PIONEERS IN EDUCATION 

JEAN JACQUES EQUSSEAU 

AND EDUCATION FROM NATURE 

BY 

GABRIEL C0MPAYR]E; 

CORRESPONDENT OF THE INSTITUTE ; DIRECTOR OP THE ACADEMY 
OF LYONS; AUTHOR OF "PSYCHOLOGY APPLIED TO 



LECTURES ON PEDAGOGY 
ETC. 



TRANSLATED BY 
R. P. JAGG 



NEW YORK 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

PUBLISHERS 



fTi^HYofCOWGRESSJ 
\wu Cooles RecelYod i 

OCl 1 190f 1 

COPY D. 



Copyright, 1907, 
By THOMAS Y. CEOWELL & COMPAlirS'. 



Published, September, 1907. 



CONTENTS AND SUMMARY 

PAGE 

Preface vii 

I. Novelty of Rousseau's views on education. — Emile a 

mixture of truth and error. — Of greater importance to 
lay stress on the abiding truths than to refute uto- 
pianisms ... 1 

II. Rousseau an initiator and revolutionary. — Despite his 
originality, he had his forerunners : Montaigne, Fenelon, 

V Locke, etc. — Turgot had previously preached the re- 

turn to nature. — A study of children necessary in 
order to educate them. — The psychology of infancy 
contained in Emile. — Rousseau had observed the chil- 
dren of others. — His deficiency in professional experi- 
ence. — Lacking in connected study. — Influen«e of 
personal reminiscences on Rousseau's pedagogical 
theories. — Emile is self-taught. — Emile's education is 
often conceived by Rousseau as a fancied antithesis to 
the realities of his own life and character. — Rousseau, 
in his visionary structure, reacted against himself . 6 

' III. Essential principles of Emile, and their results. — The 
doctrine of original innocence. — Positive statements. 

V — Pessimism in regard to society : optimism in regard 

to nature. — Return to the natural man advocated, ^r-—- — 
In consequence, "negative" education until the age of 
twelve. — No moral authority. — No didactic teaching. 
— Paradoxes on paradoxes. — Neither punishments nor 
rewards. — The child is of necessity subjected to the laws 
of nature. — Suppression of the authority of parents and 
masters : Rousseau's capital error. — Inactive, expec- 
iii 



iv CONTENTS AND SUMMARY 

PAGE 

tant education. — Abnormal isolation of Emile. — 
Contrived situations. — Tricks of composition. — De- 
spite his contradictions, Rousseau is a partisan of 
domestic education. — Praise of family life. — The duty 
of mothers to nurse their children. — Obligations of 
fathers. — Another paradox: ''successive" education. 

— Artificial division of the life of the child and the youth 
into three periods. — Correct views concerning the char- 
acteristics proper to each age. — Is it necessary to treat 
the child as a man? — Unjustifiable postponement of 
moral education. — Religious training delayed until 
adolescence. — The Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard. 

— If Nature should speak, with what she could right- 
fully reproach Rousseau 20 

IV. The eternal truths of Emile. — Physical education. — 
Minute directions regarding the hygiene of childhood. 

— Importance of bodily exercise from a moral view- 
point. — Education in the country. — Emile is taught 
a manual trade : why ? — Education of the senses. — 
Things, things ! — Exercise of the judgment in the 
domain of tangible knowledge. — Programme of utili- 
tarian studies. — The art of action. — Necessity of 
adapting education to life. — Neither literature nor his- 
tory. — Regarding the last point, Rousseau makes a 
retraction in the Considerations sur le gouvernement de 
Pologne. — As for the ancient languages, they are not a 
utihty. — Nature study. — Astronomy, physics. — 
Geography without maps. — Emile at fifteen : more 
teachable than taught. — Education of the will. — 
Emile brought up in liberty. — Make the child happy. 

— Emile, however, knows how to bear suffering. — 
Introduction to social feelings. — Emile a philanthro- 
pist. — Rousseau has not written directly for the people, 
but he has, however, prepared the way for popular in- 



CONTENTS AND SUMMARY v 

PAGE 

struction. — What he wished to form was "just a man. '* 

— Unconcern regarding professional education. — 
Occasional awakening of the practical spirit in Rous- 
seau. — Travel abroad for purposes of study. — Emile 
learns on the spot two or three modern languages . 52 

V. Education of Sophie, the ideal woman. — The treatise 

turns into a romance. — Sophie is not, however, alto- 
gether an imaginary being: she existed. — Rousseau's 
mistakes in his views on the education of women. — 
Sophie's education is the reverse of Emile 's. — Subordi- 
nation of the woman to the man. — Rousseau does 
not admit the equality of the sexes. — Incomplete 
psychology. — Woman's defects. — Her qualities. — 
Woman should remain woman. — Rousseau not a 
woman's rights man. — Sophie's education Hmited. — 
"Household education." — Needlework. — A young 
woman should go into society. — She should be given 
rehgious instruction in good season. — Woman should 
think, in order to fulfil her duties as a wife and mother. 

— Her personality slightly overlooked. — The authority 
which she exercises is based on her natural graces. — 
Sophie is already to an extent the modern lovely and 
attractive woman, created not for the church and the 
convent, but for family life 81 

VI. Success of Emile. — Extraordinary influence of Rous- 
seau. — Numerous works in imitation or in refutation. 

g — U El eve de la nature by de Beaurieu. — Effect of 
Rousseau's inspiration on the French Revolution. — 
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and the Ecole de la patrie. — 
Mme. Roland's admiration for Rousseau. — Mme. de 
Stael's, Mme. de Genlis, Mme. de Necker de Saussure. 

— International reputation of Emile. — Enthusiastic 
testimonies from Germany. — Basedow and Lavater. 

— Kant and his Traite de pedagogie. — Goethe, Schiller, 



vi CONTENTS AND SUMMARY 



J.-P. Richter, Herder, Pestalozzi, etc. — Favourable 
appreciation of English writers: John Morley, R. H. 
Quick, etc. — The least success in the United States. — 
However, American education strives to attain the ideal 
dreamed of by Rousseau. — How Rousseau's pedagogi- 
cal spirit has insinuated itself into modern methods of 
teaching and educational practices. — It has raised and 
ennobled the educator's part. — How he is at times a 
stoic. — He remains a great enticer of intellects. — Why 
he will never cease to be loved 100 

BiBLIOGKAPHY 119 



PEEFACE 

In publishing a series of monographs on the 
" Pioneers in Education/' those of all nations and 
of every age, we have several aims in view. 

In the first place, we wish to represent the men 
who deserve to have their names on the honour 
list in the history of education, all who have in 
any remarkable way contributed to the reform 
and progress of the instruction and advancement 
of humanity ; to represent them as they lived ; to 
show what they thought and did ; and to exhibit 
their doctrines and methods, and their moral 
character. 

But after having portrayed each heroic figure 
clearly, we must also sketch his background, the 
general tendencies of the epoch in which the re- 
former lived, the scholastic institutions of his coun- 
try, and the genius, so to speak, of his race, in 
order that we may set forth in successive pictures 
the struggles and the progress of the civilized races. 

In the last place, we wish to do more than write 
a historical narrative merely. Our ambition is 
higher : it is to bring face to face ideas held long 
ago with modern opinions, with the needs and 

vii 



viii PREFACE 

aspirations of society to-day, and thus to prepare 
the way for a solution of the pedagogical problems 
confronting the twentieth century. 

If we have chosen J.-J. Rousseau to open this 
gallery of portraits, it is not because he was a sure 
guide, an irreproachable leader. But in the cause 
of education he has been a great inciter of ideas in 
others, the initiator of the modern movement, the 
" leader " of most of the educators who came after 
him. Pestalozzi, Spencer, to cite only two, have 
undoubtedly been his disciples. He has assailed 
the routine of tradition; he has broken short off 
with the past ; and if he has not always sown the 
seed in the field of education, he has at least 
watered it, rid it of encumbering weeds, leaving to 
his successors the care of its cultivation and fertili- 
zation for later flowering. We therefore render 
but simple justice and place him where he belongs, 
when we mention him first. 

We dedicate this study and those which follow 
it to all people who are interested in the cause of 
education, and who think, as we do, that this ques- 
tion is the vital one, the one upon which depends 
the future of the people ; without which no social 
reform is possible; that, finally, the progress of 
education is the question of life and death for soci- 
ety and the individual alike. 



EOUSSEAU 



For two centuries the works of J.-J. Rousseau have 
been read and reread and perpetually annotated. 
Everything concerning him having been said again 
and again during this period, pretensions to origi- 
nahty in so minutely explored a subject are scarcely 
possible. It is, however, always interesting to return 
to the ideas of an independent and intrepid thinker, 
one in whose writings paradox and truth are sown 
broadcast, whose extraordinary influence over the 
minds of men is a kind of fascination, and of whom 
M. Melchior de Vogiie could recently say that '^he 
had monopoHzed our whole pohtical and social 
future." Rousseau's ideas on education, which 
also we intend to discuss here, were so original when 
Emile was pubHshed in 1762 that they still have 
claims to novelty, and many a pamphlet, many a 
book on education, which in 1899 or 1900 earned 
for its author the reputation of being a daring in- 
novator is, nevertheless, merely the reissue of some 

1 



2 ROUSSEAU 

of the theories dear to Rousseau. Is it not also 
true that the Hght of progress and the broader 
horizons revealed by the succession of the ages are 
able to rejuvenate and reillumine a subject to all 
appearance exhausted? 

Emile is a knotty, tangled book, full of matter, 
and to such an extent is the true mingled with the 
false, imagination and hazardous dream with keen, 
accurate observation and reasoning power, that at 
first a full comprehension of it is impossible. It is 
not one of those simple, straightforward works which 
yield their secret from the outset ; it is an intricate 
composition, half novel, half philosophical treatise, 
which — supposing that Rousseau had not written 
La Nouvelle Heloise — would be sufficient to justify 
the title of a recent study by M. Faguet, J -J, 
Rousseau, romancier frangais, just as it gave him 
the right to be called "a psychologist of the first 
degree," an appellation bestowed on him by Mr. 
Davidson, an American author. The propositions 
advanced in it by Rousseau, with all the ardor of his 
fervid imagination and all the allurements of an en- 
chanted pen, are at first disconcerting to the reader : 
some minds are captivated, others roused to distrust. 
Many are the perusals necessary before a path can 
be traced through this confusion of philosophic 
meditation and sentimental fancy. Did not his own 



ROUSSEAU 3 

steps wander, as when, for example, having intro- 
duced Emile to us as an orphan, he makes him the 
recipient of letters from his father and mother as a 
means of inducing him to learn to read ? 

Though at first one is tempted to protest against 
the audacities and blunders of a venturesome mind 
lacking in balance, yet, on reflection, it becomes ap- 
parent that the greater part of his paradoxes conceal 
a fund of truth — not, indeed, a commonplace, but 
an original conception, a thought reaching into the 
future, the accuracy of which will, Uttle by little, be 
proved by experience. Oftentimes the myths with 
which he seemed most infatuated receive from him- 
self a decisive reply. Elsewhere, to find oneself in 
agreement with him, it is only necessary to set aside 
the tricks of style with which he chose to envelop 
his ideas. In short, Emile is a combative book ^^full 
of fire and smoke, '' and as on a battlefield a just idea 
of the positions which have been carried can only 
be obtained after the smoke of the cannonade has 
cleared away, so, to grasp and distinguish the re- 
sults of Rousseau^s rapid advance on the field of the 
new education, the sound of the sonorous sentences, 
the tumult of the figures of speech, apostrophe, and 
prosopopseia in his inflamed harangues must be 
allowed to die away. Unquestionably, certain por- 
tions of Emile have grown old, but others have 



4 ROUSSEAU 

required the passage of a hundred years and 
more ere they could be truly understood and could 
present themselves in their full force. 

The preceding sentences describe the spirit in 
which this study has been conceived : less to criticise 
Rousseau than to bring to Hght the treasures of 
abiding truth which he has, as it were, buried in a 
book described truly by him as ^Hhe most useful 
and considerable'' of his writings. It were an easy 
matter to convict him of flagrant utopianism : this 
commonplace task of refutation will occupy us no 
more than is absolutely necessary. Without con- 
cealing any of the sophisms of Emile, our principal 
aim will be to ascertain in what Rousseau's guidance 
may still be useful to us. True criticism is that 
which insists upon the good, and deals with the bad 
only to explain it. Rather for posterity and for the 
future did Rousseau speak than for his contem- 
poraries and the period in which he hved. In the 
forgotten recesses of Emile lurk more than one 
reflection which, hitherto unperceived, proves to be 
fruitful in instruction for the people of our time, and 
directly suited to present requirements; so great 
was the perspicacity of a philosopher, a '^finder of 
hidden springs," who, thirty years in advance, had 
predicted the French Revolution at the same time 
that he was preparing it. Par greater in importance, 



ROUSSEAU 5 

however, than a multitude of isolated truths, is the 
general spirit animating the entire book. Emile de- 
serves to remain the eternal object of the educator's 
meditation, were it only because it is an act of faith 
and trust in humanity. 



II 



Rousseau is truly an initiator; nay more, a revo- 
lutionary. He forestalled the generations of 1789, 
even those of 1793, which claimed to be the re- 
constitutors of society and the regenerators of the 
human race, as expressed in Barere's energetic speech 
to his colleagues of the Convention, ^^You are con- 
voked for the recommencement of history." In such 
times of crisis and disturbance the attention of 
vigilant thinkers is naturally directed to children 
and education ; for by education alone can one expect 
to guide new souls along the paths of a regenerated 
existence. Such was Rousseau's ambition. He 
was the reformer, the dreamer, if you will, who, in 
his ardent protest against reahties which he con- 
demns, aspires in all things to a radical renovation 
of human institutions. This appeal to the ideal — 
to leave unmentioned those first attempts by which 
he had already trained his critical enthusiasm — 
had as its result the splendid trilogy of his principal 
works, pubhshed in quick succession in three years. 
La Nouvelle Heloisej in 1759, the Contrat social and 

6 



ROUSSEAU 7 

Emile in a single year, 1762; three masterpieces 
which, despite diversity of form and subject, proceed 
from a common inspiration, tending equally, as they 
do, to the reformation of society, the first in its 
domestic morals, the second in its political constitu- 
tion, and lastly Emile, in the laws of education for 
children and youths. 

Powerful as may be Rousseau^s inventive origi- 
nahty, we are far from claiming that his educational 
system, which for eight years occupied his medita- 
tions, is a stroke of genius, a miraculous revelation, 
neither prepared nor announced by anything in the 
past. Rousseau had his forerunners and inspirers. 
A Benedictine — Dom Cajot — who might have em- 
ployed his time to better purpose, wrote a large 
volume on Rousseau's Plagiarisms: the plagiarisms 
we deny, but imitation and indebtedness must be 
admitted. The glory of even the most original gen- 
iuses suffers no diminution though it be estabUshed 
that some of their most famous conceptions were 
dimly perceived and outhned before they succeeded, 
as it were, in giving substance to vague intellectual 
shadow by the intensity of their personal reflection. 
Rousseau was impregnated with Montaigne and 
quotes him constantly. He had read and ''de- 
voured" the Port Royal books. Fenelon, ''wise" 
Locke, "good^Rollin, and " learned "Fleury dictated 



8 ROUSSEAU 

some of his finest precepts. Locke, with his practical 
mind and somewhat prosy sound sense, doubtless 
has no great resemblance to Rousseau; he inspired 
him, nevertheless, in his campaign against weak, 
effeminate education, and also against '' bookish" 
instruction. Rousseau does not appear to have been 
familiar with Rabelais, yet there are obvious simi- 
larities between Emile's education and that which 
Epistemon instituted for the profit of young Gar- 
gantua, that other imaginary being and pupil of 
nature. Not only did Rousseau study and annotate 
the Pro jet de paix perpetuelle by the abbe of Saint- 
Pierre, that man so fertile in projects, he continues 
it by his utihtarian tendencies and taste for ethical 
education. Other names might well be mentioned. 
. . . But the author of Emile transfigures what- 
ever he touches, and transforms all that he borrows. 
His exuberant imagination gives fresh form and 
color to ideas lent by others : timid, they become 
imperious; vague, they obtain a sharp definition; 
like feeble shrubs, which, transplanted to a rich and 
fertile soil, grow up into vigorous trees. 

Of all Rousseau's predecessors it is perhaps Turgot 
who most clearly traced out the new paths. The 
author of Emile does not appear, indeed, to have had 
any knowledge of the views which Turgot expounded 
in the long epistle, — a veritable memoir, — which he 



ROUSSEAU 9 

addressed in 1751 to Mme. de Graffigny, the then 
celebrated authoress of Lettres peruviennes. It is not 
a rare thing, however, for minds in motion to meet at 
the same period of time in the same inspirations 
without mutual arrangement. Earlier than Rousseau 
by ten years, and with equal conviction, Turgot 
preached the return to nature. '^Our education," 
said he, ^^is mere pedantry: everything is taught us 
quite against nature." — '^Nature must be studied 
and consulted, so that she may be assisted and 
we be saved the detriment of thwarting her." — 
^Thildren^s heads are filled with a mass of abstract 
notions which they ^cannot grasp, and all the time 
nature is calHng them to her through every percep- 
tible object." Down to the fundamental maxim of 
Emile on the original innocence of our inclinations, 
everything has already been admitted by Turgot: 
'^All the virtues have been sown by nature in the 
heart of man : the one thing needful is to let them 
blossom forth." 

The examples quoted are sufficient to make it 
apparent that ideas in germ were diffused in the 
atmosphere around Rousseau and that he collected 
them for development. It is, however, no less ap- 
parent that from himself, from his own rich store 
and a "priori views of human nature, if not from a 
practical experience which he lacked, was drawn the 



10 ROUSSEAU 

substance of his treatise De VEducation. Rousseau 
reasoned and imagined still more than he beheld 
and observed. This is not because he overlooked the 
necessity for observation : he was fully ahve to it 
and knew exactly in what he was deficient to treat 
with competence the great subject upon which he 
was entering. This is proved by the letter written 
by him to one of his protectresses, Mme. de Crequy, 
on the 15th of January, 1759, when. La Nouvelle 
Heloise being finished, he had begun in earnest the 
composition of Emile: '^Speaking of education, 
there are some ideas on this subject which I should 
be tempted to put on paper if I had a Uttle assistance ; 
but some observations which I cannot supply are 
necessary. You, Madam, are a mother and, though 
devout, a philosopher ; you have educated your son. 
Were you wilUng, in your spare moments, to jot 
down some reflections on this matter and com- 
municate them to me, you would be well repaid 
for your trouble should they assist me in the pro- 
duction of a useful work." The unnatural father 
who had not reared his own offspring was reduced 
to begging the experience of others. . . . 

Rousseau was aware, then, that a study of child- 
hood is necessary before rules for the management 
of children can be estabhshed. If it is correct to 
say that he endowed France with a new Uterature 



ROUSSEAU 11 

and that he was one of the ancestors of romanticism, 
it is equally correct to affirm that in his manner he 
inaugurated those important studies which for some 
years have been in vogue under the name of '^ psy- 
chology of the child." A well-stocked chapter on 
this new psychology could easily be made by collect- 
ing the numerous accurate, subtle observations on 
the character and tastes of infancy which are 
scattered through the long pages of Emile. ^ Chil- 
dren always think only of the present. ... I know 
of nothing for which, with a Httle ingenuity, one 
cannot inspire them with a taste, a passion even, 
and this without rendering them vain or jealous of 
the acquirements of others. Their vivacity, their 
imitative mind, and especially their natural gayety 
are sufficient for this. . . . Every age in fife, and 
especially the age of infancy, desires to create, to 
imitate, to produce, to manifest power and activity." 
These quotations might be multiplied many 
times, and it might be shown how greatly Rousseau 
dehghted in studying children — alas ! why must it 
be added, other people's children ? It is sad to see 
him take up his position at the window of his dreary 
house, empty through his own fault, to watch the 
children coming out of school and to observe by 
stealth the conversations, games, and childish actions 
of the little scholars. . . . ''Never did a man," says 



12 ROUSSEAU 

he in the last but one of the Reveries d'un promeneur 
solitaire, ^^ find more pleasure than myself in watch- 
ing youngsters romp and play together!" And he 
adds, ^^If I have made some progress in the knowl- 
edge of the human heart, it is the pleasure that I. 
used to take in watching and observing children 
which has earned me that knowledge/' 

How much more accurate would Rousseau's 
psychology have been, however, if, instead of a fleet- 
ing attention paid to a few street Arabs, whom he 
watched for a moment at their frolics, he had been 
able to exercise the attentive observation of a father 
who, day by day, watches the birth and develop- 
ment of his son's mind. 

It is, moreover, noteworthy that the solicitude 
for education came to Rousseau because he had 
criminally abandoned his five children, as though 
he had felt himself compelled to make partial 
reparation for the most serious of all his moral 
shortcomings. ''The ideas with which my fault has 
filled my mind have contributed to turn my medi- 
tations to the subject of education. . . ." 

Rousseau was also deficient in professional ex- 
perience of instruction. I am well aware that to the 
long list of occupations which he took up in the 
course of his vagrant youth and Bohemian existence, 
when he was successively engraver's apprentice, 



ROUSSEAU 13 

recorder's clerk, clerk, secretary, music copyist, — ■ 
Grimm, who did not like him, once advised him 
to sell lemonade, — the occupation of tutor must be 
added ; but he practised it so little and so ill ! . . . 
In 1739 — he was then twenty-seven — Bonnot de 
Mably, royal provost at Lyons, confided to him the 
education of his two sons. At first he appUed him- 
self to this task, thinking himself fitted for it. He 
was soon disabused, however: '^I did nothing worth 
doing.'' He could only employ three methods of 
discipHne, '^always useless and pernicious with chil- 
dren,'' — sentiment, argument, and anger. Sentiment 
he never renounces, as, when reproving Emile for a 
fault, the tutor will only say, ''My boy, you have 
hurt me ! " . . . Argument, however, he excludes 
pitilessly from the child's instruction, convinced 
henceforth, contrary to Locke's doctrine, that it is 
not advisable to argue and reason too early with 
children, ''who, though they may be reasoners, are 
no more reasonable for that." Quickly finding dis- 
tasteful a profession for which he was in no way 
suited, Rousseau resigned it at the end of a year, 
but not before he had drawn up for M. de Sainte- 
Marie, one of his two pupils, an educational scheme 
in which neither thought nor style announce the 
brilHant and profound author of Entile, 
If Rousseau was neither an assiduous observer of 



14 ROUSSEAU 

childhood nor a professor — nor even a pupil; as he 
never studied in a connected manner, and was 
a student only of what has been called 'Hhe Uni- 
versity of Charmettes'^; as a compensation he felt 
much and lived much ; and for the formation of a 
powerful mind, a regular course of study at Plessis 
College would certainly have been less advanta- 
geous and efficacious than that agitated existence 
which led Roussean into all grades of society, into 
drawing-room and anteroom, which made him in 
succession the friend of philosophers and the table 
companion of great lords, a plebeian on good terms 
with the people, and the petted favorite of great 
ladies, countesses, duchesses, and marchionesses. 

It is indisputable that Rousseau put much of his 
personality, that he worked many reminiscences of 
his life and reflections of his mind, into the con- 
ception of the model pupil which he fashioned for 
humanity. Montaigne said, ^'I am the substance of 
my book." Is this so with Rousseau? Could he 
also say, as Amiel insinuates, '^My system and my- 
self make one"? Did he conceive Emile in his 
hkeness and in his resemblance? Amiel claims 
that he weaves nothing but his own substance into 
his most magnificent theories, that he is first and 
foremost a '^subjective." We do not deny this, and 
we are aware that as a general rule educators have 



ROUSSEAU 15 

a natural tendency to project themselves, as it were, 
into the plans which they recommend for others' 
imitation. When Rousseau, for example, sup- 
presses all didactic teaching in instruction, what 
does he do beyond setting up' as a rule his own 
experience? ^^What little I know, I learned by 
myself. I could never learn anything from a 
master. ..." Rousseau is self-taught, and so is 
Emile. 

On the other hand, however, on how many other 
points are the fancies of Emile's education in formal 
opposition with the realities of Rousseau's existence ? 
It follows naturally that people satisfied with their 
destiny recommend to others what they have found 
to answer in their own case. But Rousseau was dis- 
satisfied with himself and his lot, no less than with 
society. The education which he desired, appears, 
as a consequence, to have been conceived in an effort 
of reaction against his own condition, as a contrast 
to the imprudences from which he had suffered, and 
the errors or faults committed by him. Poor 
stricken mind and infirm, diseased body, he consoles 
himself by evoking the ideal image of a hardy child, 
healthy in mind and body. He requites himself for 
his wretchedness and imperfections by creating a 
happy, perfect being. 

He says, for example: '^As yet I had conceived 



16 ROUSSEAU 

nothing. I had felt everything.'' Is it not so as 
to escape the consequences of this precocious stimu- 
lation, which had made him morbidly sensitive, and 
demoralized for life, that, going to the opposite 
extreme, he leaves Emile unacquainted with all 
sentimental emotion until he is fifteen? He read 
to excess; before he was ten years old he had de- 
voured a whole library of novels. Is it because of 
this that, detesting and anathematizing books, he 
forbids them absolutely to Emile ? I do not know, 
said M. Brunetiere, one of our great writers whose 
childhood and youth were to such a degree lacking 
in guidance. He cannot, indeed, be said to have 
had a family: his mother died in giving birth to 
him; his father, after having spoiled him, deserted 
him. Nobody brought him up. . . . How, after 
that, could the temptation be avoided of imagining 
a situation quite the reverse, by which Emile is given 
a tutor who does not lose sight of him for a second, 
a mentor who will accompany and protect him in his 
every action right up to the threshold of the nuptial 
chamber ? 

In evil surroundings, compromised by humiliating 
society, Rousseau was conscious of all the dignity 
and nobility of mind that he had lost in the con- 
taminations of his existence: then, to educate a 
man in honor and virtue, let us eliminate all 



ROUSSEAU 17 

exterior circumstances which may sully and degrade 
him. Emile shall hve alone, far from mankind. . . . 
Rousseau lounged in servants' hall and antechamber ; 
he took part in the distractions of fashionable hfe ; 
he frequented the drawing-rooms of Paris, and now 
and again allowed himself to be seduced by society's 
artifices; he contracted numerous frivolous love 
intrigues. None of these things for the ideal man : 
the country, fresh air, outdoor hfe with its simphcity, 
apurelove, single and deep, nothing but nature. . . . 
''Farewell, Paris, city of noise, smoke, and mud, 
where woman no longer believes in purity nor man 
in virtue ! Farewell, Paris, our quest is love, happi- 
ness, and innocence; never shall we be sufficiently 
remote from thee ! . . ." 

Much of Emile is, then, a visionary structure 
erected expressly to make a contrast to Rousseau's 
actual hfe. To excuse, or at least explain, the gener- 
ation of all the wild delusions of Emikj let us never 
lose sight of the inward struggle which took place 
in its author's heart between what was noble in 
his aspirations and base in his existence : the strik- 
ing incongruity between the adoration which he 
professed for the ideal and the pitiful reaUty of the 
circumstances in which he was placed and for which 
he was in part responsible. This man, of whom 
Grimm said that ''he had nearly always been miser- 



18 ROUSSEAU 

able," bruised by the strangest adventures, weighed 
down by physical sickness, and who felt that he was 
dying whilst engaged in composing tlmile; still more 
disturbed by imaginary ills which an anxious mind 
invented for him ; embittered by that kind of mania 
of persecution which from year to year was to in- 
crease and was finally to drive him to suicide ; exas- 
perated against a state of society with whose vices 
he was the better acquainted through having par- 
ticipated in them; humiliated by the remembrance 
of what he called his youthful ^^rascalities " ; ashamed 
later of his cohabitation with an inn servant whose 
vulgarity must more than once have been a heavy 
burden to him : he felt the need of throwing himself 
back upon an ideal world, there to seek a fleeting 
forgetfulness of his moral infirmities, a compensation 
for his misfortunes, in revenge for the frailties of his 
character and the gloom of his destiny. If his hfe 
was often a painful drama, certain parts of Emile 
shall be idyls and pastorals of real poetic charm. 
He has said so: ^^The impossibility of attaining to 
actual beings has cast me into the land of delusions : 
I have made myself societies of perfect creatures. 
..." The exaggerations and phantasies to which 
we shall have to direct attention in Emile will often 
only be deliberate inventions which did not at all 
delude their inventor. As he put it when writing 



ROUSSEAU 19 

in 1763 to the prince of Wirtemberg concerning the 
scheme of education which he had addressed to him 
for his daughter Sophie, brought up in conformity 
with the principles of Emile: '^ These are, perhaps, 
only the hallucinations of a dehrious man. . . . The 
comparison of what is with what should be has given 
me a romantic mind, and has always driven me far 
from what goes on." 

What Rousseau would fain have been and was 
not, Emile is to be, or at least that is Rousseau's 
desire. 



Ill 



^Tardon me my paradoxes, ordinary reader," 
exclaims Rousseau somewhere. The best way of 
pardoning them is to attempt to extract the core of 
truth which they contain. Once we have deprived 
the essential principles of his system of the violent 
form in which this conjurer of thought was pleased 
to envelop them, it remains for us to gather together 
the general rules, the characteristic positive and un- 
questioned truths in Entile which modern education 
will never relinquish. 

''Man is born free and everywhere he is fettered," 
thus begins Contrat social. 

''Man is born good and everyivhere he has become 
corrupt," such is the sense of the preamble to Emile. 

Rousseau deHghts in these absolute statements: 
he hkes concise, peremptory formulas which compel 
attention. 

To his political sophism, "The universal will of 
the people is always right," corresponds his psy- 
chological sophism, "Nature is fundamentally 
good." 

20 



ROUSSEAU 21 

Such is the initial error which gives rise to all 
that is false in Emile. The bitterest and most in- 
cisive of pessimists when judging actual society, 
Rousseau is the most indulgent of optimists when 
he considers, beyond the work of man, the work of 
Providence, that is to say, nature. 

Nature is good and beneficent. Her creatures 
are pure, so long as they have not been perverted, 
corrupted, disfigured, and sophisticated by a pre- 
tended civilization which is merely a long decadence. 
On this point, Rousseau was in agreement with a 
number of his contemporaries. D'Holbach said, 
"Man is vicious because he has been made so^^; 
and Diderot, '^A natural man -used to exist; into 
this natural man an artificial man has been intro- 
duced." Rousseau comes back insistently to the 
same doctrine. '^Let us lay down as an incon- 
testable maxim that the first movements of nature 
are always right, and that there is no original per- 
versity in man's heart. ... All characters are 
good and healthy in themselves. . . . There is no 
error in nature. ..." 

Doubtless it would be within one's right to stop 
Rousseau at once and ask him to explain this 
flagrant contradiction: man is naturally good, and 
society, man's work, is bad. . . . But he is not 
disturbed by this incongruity. Faithful to the 



22 ROUSSEAU 

opinion which he had expressed in the two Discours 
which began his reputation, he cHngs tenaciously to 
his Utopia. He repeats in every form that, with its 
customs and prejudices, society is detestable and 
perverted, that it must be thoroughly reformed. 
Let us revive nature's authority and substitute it 
for the rule of ancient and antiquated tradition ; let 
us supersede the empire of stern discipline and op- 
pressive restriction, which mutilate and deform the 
human faculties, by the reign of young Hberty, which 
will assist in their expansion. 

By such a challenge hurled a^ every human in- 
stitution, Rousseau had in view more than a simple 
pedagogical reformation : he was announcing a social 
revolution. Authentically he is the father of the 
revolutionists whose idol he was to become : let us 
not forget that Marat, in 1788, read Contrat social 
to the cheers of an enthusiastic audience. 

From the educational point of view, the principle 
laid down by Rousseau has for consequence the 
necessity of reconstructing natural man, '^ original'' 
man according to the expression of which he had 
already made use in his Discours sur Vinegalite 
parmi les hommes, man as he was in the primitive 
scheme of nature and Providence — for in Rousseau's 
religious mind, behind nature is Providence, who is 
the keystone of his philosophical doctrine ~ man, 



ROUSSEAU 23 

in short, as he would be, if social hfe and its long 
corruption had not perverted him, natural man, in 
a word, and not ^^ human man." 

Let us not stop to demonstrate that Rousseau is 
in error, that there are in nature germs for evil as 
well as good, and that education is consequently 
something more than a complaisant auxiliary, that 
it should be a resistive force which corrects and 
compensates. Let us rather bear in mind that the 
contrary opinion, which also was absolute, that of a 
nature essentially bad, vitiated in its origin, and pre- 
destined exclusively to evil had long prevailed and 
still held sovereign sway. And from this radical 
condemnation of humanity proceeded a strict and 
rigid education, made up chiefly of repression, 
bristling with prohibition and chastisement, which 
conceded nothing to the child^s native hberty. Trial 
had been made of all discipHnary instruments save 
one, precisely the one which alone could succeed, — 
well regulated Hberty. Rousseau arises, and with 
eclat he opposes the conception of the old fallen 
Adam whose fated inheritance must be eradicated 
from every man by the contrary doctrine of a hu- 
manity instinctively impelled to good and, accord- 
ingly, destined to develop in full Hberty. The con- 
tradictory movements of the ideas which appear in 
succession on the theatre of human opinion recall 



24 ROUSSEAU 

in some degree those comedies in which a speaker 
primed with one side of a question is answered by 
another, who goes to the opposite extreme, the better 
to display the conflict of sentiments. Both the one 
and the other are wrong, but the colhsion of opposite 
opinions will cause the truth which lies between to 
stand out. Even at the risk of straining his voice 
and exaggerating his repartee, it Was good that an 
eloquent thinker, in reply to those who for two 
thousand years had repeated the lament of de- 
generate mankind, should testify to his confidence 
and happy faith in the natural powers and tendencies 
of man : thus, thirty years before the French Revo- 
lution promulgated the Declaration des droits de 
Vhomme, a pedagogue announced the declaration of 
childhood^s rights, of its right to an education of 
liberty. ^^It is wrong," says Rousseau, *^ always to 
speak to children of their duties, never of their 
rights." Emile was, as it were, the charter of child- 
hood's freedom. 

Paradox begets paradox, and from the erroneous 
principle which serves as the starting-point of Emile 
has sprung the entire series of pedagogical falsities, 
for which Rousseau has been so severely but so 
justly reproved, what Nisard called his ^^enormi- 
ties," and the EngUsh pedagogue, R. Hebert Quick, 
'^his extravagances." 



ROUSSEAU 25 

The first of these capital errors is that education, 
at any rate to the age of twelve, should be strictly 
''negative.'^ ^Tositive'^ education will only begin 
for Emile after a long intellectual idleness and an 
equally lengthy moral inaction. Since nature tends 
of itself towards its ends, she should be left alone. 
In La Nouvelle Heloise, Julie was already of opinion 
that education consists ^^in doing nothing at all.'' 
The best educator is the one who acts least, inter- 
vening only to remove obstacles which would hinder 
the free play of nature, or to create circumstances 
favorable to it. 

Education is to be doubly negative : in discipHne 
and instruction ahke. On the one hand, no com- 
mands are to be given to the child; on the other, 
he is to be taught nothing. 

Hence, no moral authority, no material discipHne 
in the child's upbringing. Neither precepts nor chas- 
tisements, at least such as are inflicted by human 
intention, nor rewards of any kind. No punish- 
ments other than those which are the natural re- 
sults of the action and the consequences of the fault 
committed. It is the principle which we find again 
in Herbert Spencer, ^' Never offer to the indiscreet 
desires of a child any other obstacles than physical 
ones." The hand of man is to be nowhere apparent. 
Emile must remain alone in the presence of nature 



26 ROUSSEAU 

and her might. Knowledge of good and evil is 
not for children. . . . The inspiration of this kind 
of discipHnary nihiUsm was perhaps obtained by 
Rousseau from his personal remembrances. ^^He 
had never obeyed," says Amiel. ^^He had known 
neither kindly family control nor firm scholastic 
discipHne.'' Emile does not know what obedience 
is, nor disobedience either, as he never receives 
commands. He has no idea that a human will other 
than his own can exist. He is subjected to one law 
only, an inflexible one, however, that of the possible 
and the impossible. He knows no other authority 
than that of nature ^s laws, no other dependence than 
that of the imperative necessity of things. 

Would it serve any useful purpose to reply to 
Rousseau, to point out to him that he is in error, 
that there is indeed nothing more artificial and con- 
trary to nature than this so-called natural education, 
in which is suppressed the most natural thing in the 
world, — the authority of parents and masters? 
What? No longer could anything be expected in 
the direction of a child's conduct from either the 
tender insinuations of a mother's affection, or the 
injunctions of a father's strong will, at once gentle 
and firm, or the persuasive exhortations of a kindly 
and watchful master? It may be wise to exclude 
from discipHne the caprices of maladroit parents who 



ROUSSEAU 27 

command and countermand, who go from the ex- 
treme of bhnd complacency to that of brutal severity ; 
but what folly it would be to reject the benefits to 
the moral education of a child permitted by the 
action of authority exercised with prudence and 
wisdom. Prevent the birth of vice, and you will 
have done enough for virtue, protests Rousseau. 
Just as he says a little later. Prevent error and 
prejudice from obtaining entrance into Emile's mind, 
and you will have done enough for knowledge. No, 
prevention of evil is not sufficient: it is necessary 
to teach good. If Emile^s intellect Hes fallow for 
twelve years, it will be like those fields which the 
husbandman does not till or sow : weeds will spring 
up in alarming abundance ; and when their destruc- 
tion is desired, it will be too late. Rousseau was 
better inspired in La Nouvelle Helo'isej in which he 
said: ''A good nature should be cultivated. . . . 
Children must be taught to obey their mother." 

In the study which he has devoted to Emile, and 
which is the best we know, John Morley remarks 
with reason that omission of the principle of authority 
is the fundamental weakness of Rousseau^s system. 
In this system, says he, in effect, the child is always 
to suppose that it is following its own judgment or 
impulses. ... It must not feel the constraint of 
a will other than its own. The parent and the 



28 ROUSSEAU 

master must not intervene ; ... as though parents 
were not a part of nature? . . . And, moreover, 
why are the effects of conduct upon the actor^s own 
physical well-being to be the only effects honored 
with the title of being natural, neglecting the feel- 
ings of approbation or disapproval which this same 
conduct inspires? One of the most important of 
educating influences is lost if the young are not 
taught to place the feelings of others in a front 
place. The acquirement of many excellent quahties 
is threatened if a child, in its ignorance and frailty, is 
not inclined naturally to respect, in its parents and 
masters, a better-informed authority and an expe- 
rience riper than its own. 

No less serious is the error in respect of the other 
aspect of negative education, — the adjournment of 
instruction. Here Rousseau becomes enthusiastic, 
and he impressively eulogizes the supposed benefits 
of the long mental idleness which he imposes on his 
pupil. ^'May I venture to state the greatest, the 
most important, the most useful rule in all education ? 
it is, not to gain time, but to lose it. . . . Reading 
is the scourge of childhood. . . . Apparent facility 
in learning is the ruin of children. ... I teach the 
art of being ignorant. . . .'' No books, then, no 
verbal lesson. Emile will grow up Hke a httle 
savage, without intellectual culture, exercising only 



ROUSSEAU 29 

his body and his senses. The ideal is for him to 
remain ignorant as long as possible, to reach the 
age of twelve not even knowing ^^how to distinguish 
his right hand from his left/' Rousseau, who goes 
into ecstasies in face of his work, says, with humorous 
exaggeration, ^^I would as soon require a child of 
ten to be five feet tall as to be judicious ; " . . . and 
again, ^^Emile would not hesitate to give the whole 
Academie des sciences'' — supposing that he is 
aware of its existence — '^for a pastry-cook's shop." 
Undoubtedly, not everything is blameworthy in 
the inactive, expectant education which Rousseau 
recommends. Let us retain this much of it, that it 
is well not to be in haste, not to outdistance the 
progress natural to the age ; that it is imprudent and 
dangerous to weary a child with a precocious and 
premature education; that one risks exhausting its 
powers by fatiguing them too soon. But what a 
number of arguments array themselves against the 
system which, by a contrary abuse, leaves the in- 
tellectual faculties uncultured during the first twelve 
years, perhaps the most fruitful of one's whole Hfe ! 
Rousseau himself points out an objection that might 
well be final : it is that the mind, so long enervated 
by inaction, will become incapable of action, and 
^^will be absorbed by matter." How can it be hoped 
that Emile, who has studied nothing, will all at 



30 ROUSSEAU 

once have the desire and abiHty to learn everything, 
that his dormant thought will spring into wakeful- 
ness at the magic summons of his tutor, to acquire 
as by enchantment all the attainments in which he 
is deficient ? And especially, how can the versatility 
and flexibihty of the intellectual organs required by 
every study be assured him in a short time, when 
their preparation by continued exercise and slow 
initiation has been neglected ? Finally, if Rousseau^s 
statement were true, if the child were incapable of 
all abstract study, if it were necessary to prohibit 
all mental work for it till the age of twelve, can the 
result be imagined ? It would be necessary to close 
all elementary schools, and the instruction of the 
people would be impossible. 

I am well aware that Rousseau, as a substitute 
for books and formal lessons, appeals to nature^s 
teachings. Emile has learned nothing by heart ; he 
scarcely knows what a book is. To make up for 
this, he knows much from experience; '^he reads in 
nature^s book." First, let us point out that nature 
does not consent to play the part of schoolmistress, 
with which Rousseau wishes to saddle her, to such 
an extent. The proof of this is that he is himself 
forced to resort to artifices, to the most comphcated 
stratagems, to inculcate into his pupil the rare gleams 
of knowledge which hghten the darkness of his 



ROUSSEAU 31 

ignorance. Nature needs a stage carpenter to 
prepare the laboriously arranged scenes in which 
an attempt is made to provide Emile with an equiva- 
lent for the lessons of everyday education. Such is 
the juggler episode, intended to reveal to him some 
notions of elementary physics ; such is the conver- 
sation with Robert the gardener on the origin 
of property. Doubtless, Emile will know more 
thoroughly the few Httle things thus learned by 
himself. But not only will his instruction be 
singularly limited, this teaching from experience 
and nature will also be very slow. It will take him 
months and years to discover what he might just 
as well have learned in a few hours, by means of 
well-arranged lessons or well-chosen reading. Is, 
then, everything that the clear diction of a professor 
can put within the reach of the smallest scholar, all 
the hght that books can bring to the dawning intel- 
ligence, to be useless? And is it to benefit Emile 
nothing that he is heir to a long Hne of generations 
who have worked, thought, and written, although 
that effort of centuries has accumulated treasuries 
of truths upon which newcomers need only draw 
in order to derive instruction? 

It is sufficient, moreover, to condemn a system 
which would result in nothing less than the sup- 
pression of all moral discipHne and all didactic 



32 ROUSSEAU 

teaching during the first period of Hfe, that Rous- 
seau, to apply it, is obUged to place his pupil in an ab- 
normal situation, to set him free from the ordinary 
conditions of existence, to isolate him in a kind of 
exile, to withdraw him from his parents' control in 
order to confide him to a stranger's keeping. Aston- 
ishment has been expressed that Rousseau, a sincere 
friend and an apostle of family Hfe, — we shall soon 
be convinced of that, — suppressed parents, brothers, 
and sisters in his educational novel. Where are the 
exquisite pictures which he had outhned in La 
Nouvelle Heloise of the games and education mutu- 
ally shared by JuHe's children brought up under 
their mother's eyes ? If Rousseau is recanting, it is 
because he was forced into doing so by the necessity 
of giving an appearance of practical achievement to 
his dream of negative education. How, indeed, can 
one suppose that a father and mother are capable 
of holding sufficiently aloof from the education of a 
son reared by themselves, to keep from influencing 
him by admonitions, severe at need, or by affectionate 
caresses ? It was absolutely necessary that the hero 
of natural education should live alone in his child- 
hood, without either parents, comrades, God, or 
master, — for God is not mentioned to him till much 
later, when he is eighteen ; and as for the tutor who 
bears him company he is, properly speaking, neither 



ROUSSEAU 33 

master nor professor: he is simply a guardian, a 
vigilant sentinel, whose orders are to protect Emile 
against influences from without, against everything 
which could hinder nature ^s beneficent action, and 
whose part is restricted to forming around his pupil, 
as it were, an isolating wall. 

This strange isolation of a child to whom all inter- 
course with the rest of the human species is for- 
bidden is, then, only a fanciful fabrication which 
Rousseau required in order to throw into clear rehef 
the novelties of his plan. We see Httle more in it 
than a trick of composition, and it would conse- 
quently be superfluous to indulge in irony against a 
fiction which the author disavows in many passages 
of his book ; a fiction the absurd improbabihty of 
which is sufficient to demonstrate that he never 
thought of making it the universal rule of educa- 
tion. ^^I point out the goal to make for: I do not 
say that it can be reached." How suppose that 
Rousseau seriously thought it possible to realize a 
system the least defect of which would be that it 
suppress every other function than the tutor's, since 
half mankind would be kept employed as educators 
for twenty years, and as Mme. de Stael said, ^^Grand- 
fathers at most would be free to begin a personal 
career " ? A mentor, indeed, would have to be found 
for every Telemachus ; that is, for every child to be 



34 ROUSSEAU 

educated. The Christian faith, in its fervors, in- 
spired the ^^styUtes," those extravagant anchorites 
who passed their hves on the summit of a column, 
'twixt earth and sky, as though it were desired in 
this way to present in a striking and absurd form 
the necessity of rupture with the world. Similarly, 
Rousseau's naturaUstic faith suggested to him the 
invention of an exceptional being who is to Uve and 
grow up far from society, by a sort of hypothesis 
whose object is to make the power of nature's educa- 
tion evident. It is unthinkable that Rousseau should 
so imperiously call upon a mother to suckle her 
child, only to carry it away from her tenderness and 
remove it from her care as soon as it is weaned. No, 
he merely wished, in an artificial framework, to give 
free rein to his visions. Emile is no real being : he 
is a creature of reason, as it were, an engine of war 
invented to combat society. 

At bottom, as will be seen by reference to other 
passages of Emile and to Rousseau's other writings, 
domestic education never had a more fervent 
partisan. 

Often in his Correspondence does he return to the 
praise of family hfe. It is true that in his Conside- 
rations sur le gouvernement de Polognej dating from 
1772, he has altered his opinion and, by a fresh con- 
tradiction, declares himself ardently for a third solu- 



ROUSSEAU 35 

tion, education in common. Rousseau is a man of 
successive impulses, each in turn defended with the 
same impetuosity. To the Poles he resolutely 
advises national education pushed to its last 
extreme, the teachings of the Republic of Plato, 
which absorbs the man into the citizen, and con- 
fiscates the individual to hand him bodily to the 
State. Rousseau was divided all his life between 
the doctrine of individualism and that of sociahsm, 
between State sovereignty and man's Hberty. 

He says: '^The good social institutions are those 
which can best change man's nature, remove his 
absolute existence to replace it by a quite relative 
one. ... It is by pubhc education that minds are 
given a national form. . . . Pubhc education, on 
lines prescribed by the government, is one of the 
fundamental maxims of all popular government. 
..." And again, in the Encyclopcedia article on 
Political Economy J "As each man's reason is not 
left sole arbiter of his duties, so much the less should 
children's education be left to the opinions and 
prejudices of fathers. . . ." 

This is far removed from Emile's individuahstic 
education, and we wilhngly admit that it is impos- 
sible to push unconscious freedom in the mutability 
of conflicting opinions and impetuous contradictions 
farther than Rousseau does. And yet, in spite of 



36 ROUSSEAU 

all, we maintain that, viewing his aspirations as a 
whole, Rousseau is in favor of domestic educa- 
tion. Let us first read that fine page of Emile, in 
which he claims that a girl should be brought up 
by her mother, and vigorously refutes the chimeras 
of platonic education. He protests ^'against that 
civil promiscuity which mixes both sexes in the same 
employments, in the same labors, and which cannot 
but give rise to the most intolerable abuses, — against 
that subversion of the gentlest sentiments of nature 
sacrificed to an artificial sentiment which owes its 
existence to them, — as though it were not necessary 
to have a natural hold to form conventional ties ; as 
though love of kindred were not the principle of 
that which is due to the State ; as though it were 
not through the little fatherland, which is the 
family, that the heart is attached to the larger one ; 
as though it were not the good son, the good father, 
and the good husband, who make the good citi- 
zens. . . .'' 

At the great word ^'family" Rousseau's imagina- 
tion takes fire, so much the more, perhaps, as he ' 
himself neither knew its joys nor performed its 
obhgations. Talk not to him either of colleges for 
boys or of convents for girls ! Colleges he dismisses 
in a word as ^ laughable estabhshments,'' — and it is 
because he had spoken of them in this disdainful 



ROUSSEAU 37 

way that he thought, according to what he recounts 
in the Confessions, that he had drawn upon himself 
the hatred of the Jesuits, of whom, from prudence, 
he had made it a rule '^ never to speak, either well 
or ill/' As for convents, because they do not exist 
in Protestant nations, he considered the latter supe- 
rior to CathoUc nations. 

In La Nouvelle Heloise, Rousseau sharply repri- 
mands parents who put their children into the hands 
of strange masters, ''as though a tutor could re- 
place a father. ..." Elsewhere, in his letters to 
the prince of Wlirtemberg, he writes: '^ There is no 
paternal eye but a father's, and no maternal eye but 
a mother's. I should Hke to devote twenty reams 
of paper to repeating those two Hues to you, so 
much am I convinced that everything depends on 
them. . . ." 

Besides this, it is known with what eloquence, 
in Emile itself, Rousseau recalled mothers to their 
duty, as far as nursing is concerned. Undoubtedly 
he is not the first who did so. In Rome itself, in 
the second century, the philosopher Favorinus said, 
''Is it not being only half a mother to confide one's 
children to paid nurses? ..." Words of kindness, 
in agreeable contrast with the harsh manners and 
severity of a society, one of whose most illustrious 
representatives, Cicero, wrote a century earlier, 



38 ROUSSEAU 

in his TusculaneSj ''When a child dies young, con- 
solation is easily found; when it dies in the cradle, 
it is not even a matter for concern. . . /' 

In the years which preceded the pubHcation of 
EmiUj doctors and moralists had undertaken the 
same campaign, but they had carried it on without 
vigor. Rousseau put his whole heart into it, 
and as Mme. de Genhs said, ''Wisdom is less per- 
suasive than enthusiasm. Rousseau repeated what 
others had said; but he did not advise: he com- 
manded and was obeyed.^' 

In bringing the mothers back to the cradles, Rous- 
seau was not solely concerned with the child's in- 
terest and its physical needs. "If he demanded the 
nurse's milk, it was to have the mother's affection." 

In his eyes, the child is, as it were, the bearer of the 
family virtues, the pledge and at the same time the 
guarantee of conjugal love. It is the sacred bond 
which indissolubly unites husband and wife. It is 
the child which sustains and rekindles the domestic 
hearth, by the joy which its winning presence brings 
to it, as by the common duties which its education 
imposes. In the appeal which Rousseau addresses 
to parents, the father is no more forgotten than the 
mother. After saying : "Would you recall every one 
to his highest duties? Begin with the mothers," he 
adds: "As the mother is the true nurse, the father 



ROUSSEAU 39 

is the true teacher. . . . The father will make 
excuses : business, he will say, duties. . . . Doubt- 
less, the least important is to be a father ! . . .'' 

But let us return to Rousseau's chimeras, to what 
he himself described in his Preface as the ^^ dreams 
of a visionary," without giving up the idea of 
seeking and finding in them some grains of truth. 
To the illusion of negative education is attached that 
of ^^ successive'' education. Here Rousseau is going 
to contradict his essential principle, which is to 
follow nature. If there be, indeed, a fixed law of 
nature, it is that she creates nething abruptly, but 
always proceeds by slow, imperceptible evolution. 
'^With her," says Mme. Necker de Saussure, ^'one 
can nowhere lay hold on a beginning ; she is not to 
be surprised in the act of creation, and it seems that 
she is forever developing." From this very accurate 
conception has issued the fine system of '^progressive 
education." But Rousseau imagined another thing : 
a fragmentary, seriate education, divided into three 
periods. He forgets that nature makes the several 
functions of a human creature advance abreast in 
their development, and that education should ac- 
cordingly conform to this simultaneous evolution 
of the various bodil}^ and mental faculties. Quite 
otherwise, he shatters the true unity of the human 
being. ''It is," says Mme. d'Epinay, "as though 



40 ROUSSEAU 

children were forbidden to move their arms and use 
their hands whilst learning to walk." In the first 
place, by an absolute dualism, Rousseau disasso- 
ciates the mind from the body. *' Nature intended 
the body to develop before the mind.'' But of the 
mind itself, instead of one, he makes three. In the 
artificial story of Emile, there are three phases, 
radically distinct and separate from each other. 
Until twelve years old, physical hfe and sense 
exercise: nothing for either intelligence or heart. 
Emile, at the age of twelve, is only a hardy animal, 
an agile '^roebuck.'' From twelve to fifteen, the 
intellectual age, the very short period of study, in 
which the child is rapidly initiated into the elements 
of useful knowledge, is no longer submitted to the 
necessary power of the natural laws, reflects at last, 
and decides in accordance with a fresh principle, 
the idea of utihty. Lastly, — third period, — after 
the age of fifteen, sentiment and duty make their 
long-delayed appearance, ^^We enter upon the 
moral order." Abruptly, the social formation of 
the man comes under consideration. 

Such is Rousseau's bizarre programme: thus he 
establishes three superposed divisions of education, 
three stages ; and one may ask how, after this arti- 
ficial distribution of the individual, the three sections 
of the human person can join together again, and 



ROUSSEAU 41 

combine to reconstitute the natural entirety formed 
by the body and the mind. 

None the less, there is, as always, a proportion of 
just, true observation in Rousseau's arbitrary theory. 
He is right in desiring that consideration be given 
to the characteristics proper to each age of hfe, and 
that, for example, a child be treated, not as a man, 
but as a child. ^ ' Treat your pupil as his age demands. 
The wisest, '^ says he, — and he evidently intends to 
refer to Locke, — '^devote themselves to what a man 
should know, without considering what children 
are able to learn. They always seek the man in the 
child, without thinking of what he is before he be- 
comes a man." And again: ^^Let infancy mature 
in the child. We have often heard of a finished man ; 
let us at last think of a ^finished child.'" 

On this point, Rousseau is not in agreement with 
some of our modern educators, even with those who 
draw their inspiration most from him. In a recent 
book, which is extremely interesting, UEducation 
nouvelle, M. Demolins, the founder of the school of 
les Roches, the innovator who with praiseworthy 
zeal is striving to acclimatize in France certain 
portions of the manly, free English education, M. 
Demohns formulates a contrary opinion. According 
to him, it is never too soon to treat a child as a man. 
'* Treated as men," says he, ^^ children actually and 



42 ROUSSEAU 

speedily become men." And he quotes the anec- 
dote of a child of nine, who, very quickly indeed, — 
in two hours, — really became a man, simply because, 
having been received with his parents by an Enghsh 
family, the three members of this family took him 
seriously during his visit, and were wilHng to talk 
with him the whole time ! . . . 

To form men, to '^ manufacture " them, as it is now 
expressed, is the perpetual dream of educators of all 
times and countries. To have a certain measure 
of success, it is perhaps desirable to adopt a course 
somewhere between the two extreme opinions of 
M. Demohns and of Rousseau. On the one hand, 
it is never too early to school a child in his duty and 
to prepare the apprenticeship of personal responsi- 
bihty by appeahng to his reason and reflection, 
and Rousseau errs in causing the delays of which 
we know to this education of reason. On the other 
hand, however, — and here Rousseau triumphs, — 
it must not be forgotten that the child is a child, 
and that he cannot be required to exercise judgment 
and act as a free man when his judgment is not 
formed nor his hberty created. Our two peda- 
gogues, moreover, are at bottom more in agreement 
than one would think. They neither wish for a 
premature instruction which throws the child from 
the beginning into abstract studies, and according 



ROUSSEAU 43 

to Goethe ^s expressions, tends to make him into ^'a, 
subtle philosopher, a scholar, and not a man." 
M. DemoHns certainly would indorse this conclu- 
sion of Rousseau^s : '^The ordinary education is bad 
because is makes old children and young professors/' 
In the same way, as regards moral education, M. 
Demolins, who is especially opposed to disciphne 
based on ^Hhe principle of authority," cannot but 
applaud Rousseau^s exaggerations, since the latter 
expressly does away with all authority, and cen- 
sures parents and masters who have never early 
enough ^^ corrected, reprimanded, flattered, threat- 
ened, promised, instructed, reasoned." 

Where it is not permissible to fall in with Rous- 
seau^s views is in the incomprehensible delay which 
he imposes on moral education. This is, in another 
manner, more pernicious than the adjournment of 
intellectual culture. Emile has attained his fifteenth 
year, and has not as yet felt any human sentiment. 
Whom does he love? Nobody, save perhaps his 
tutor, the only man whom he knows. His mind has 
not been opened to any of those infantile affections 
which prepare the social virtues. By what miracle 
will he suddenly learn to love mankind, after hving 
so long in the cold, sterile isolation of a strictly indi- 
vidual life ? Rousseau, truly, is too summary in the 
recital of his pedagogic methods. He says, '^ Emile 



44 ROUSSEAU 

is this; Sophie is that." He endows both of them 
with all kinds of marvellous quahties and virtues; 
but he neglects to tell us how they have been ac- 
quired. Concerning the genesis of affectionate sen- 
timent, it is evident that he is reckoning on a mirac- 
ulous result which he has done nothing to prepare. 
He has left Emile^s heart empty for fifteen years, and 
in an instant he thinks that he can fill it. What a 
delusion ! Love cannot be taught like calculation. 
The formation of social feehng is a deUcate and 
difficult matter. Rousseau, moreover, compUcates 
the problem by submitting Emile to the laws of 
egoism alone. As Condillac, by a series of subtle 
transformations, derives from primal sensation the 
most abstract and general notions, so does Rousseau 
pretend, by a strange metamorphosis, to obtain 
from initial egoism alone all the altruistic sentiments. 
Self-respect is, in his eyes, the sole and fundamental 
atom of sensibihty. How could he forget that other 
atom, sympathy, which makes itself apparent from 
the dawn of fife, and whose development cannot 
too soon be encouraged and stimulated? In the 
smile which a new-born babe directs towards the one 
who suckles and cares for it, there is more than the 
expression of a material need satisfied : there is the 
instinctive response of the child to the considerate 
tenderness of the mother. ''So long as the child 



ROUSSEAU 45 

pays attention only to what affects his senses, 
arrange for all his ideas to be Hmited to sensations. 
L . ." No, on the contrary, let us open wide the 
door for the sentiments, which are, indeed, only too 
ready to enter. With children, it is necessary at 
once to mingle mind with body. 

It is known that Rousseau, in his mania for post- 
ponement, delayed until adolescence the revelation 
of religious as well as moral ideas. The reason which 
he gives is that a child, with its purely emotional 
imagination — and it is very Hkely the fault of nega- 
tive education if this be the case — could only form 
a superstitious idea of God, and would picture him 
as a human being, an old white-bearded man, a 
monarch seated on a throne. . . . Hence the pro- 
priety of awaiting the age of reason before speaking 
of God to Emile, so that he may straightway form a 
conception of him in the ideal subUmity of his 
spiritual attributes. At least, if he has deferred 
to the age of eighteen the revelation of the Supreme 
Being, Rousseau makes up for it by the splendor 
in which he invests him. He was a deist in all 
sincerity. He beUeved in God with as much con- 
viction as he beheved in the soul and in a future Hfe : 
'^I desire too greatly that there be a God, not to 
believe in him. . . .'^ Without seeking verification 
in his other writings, the Profession de foi du vicaire 



46 ROUSSEAU 

Savoyard demonstrates it in a striking manner. It 
was, in his opinion, the principal portion of Emile. 
For it he would have sacrificed all the rest. It was 
that part of his manuscript that he intrusted to the 
keeping of his surest friends, fearing, in the perpetual 
apprehensions which the printing of the work caused 
him, that his enemies, and particularly the Jesuits, 
might cause it to disappear. This was the principal 
cause of the wrath and tempest of persecution which 
were about to be let loose against him. It was this, 
on the other hand, which earned him the enthu- 
siastic praise and even the admiration of Voltaire ; 
for it is of the Profession de foi that Voltaire, so hard 
upon Emile, intended to speak, when he says that this 
^^ stupid novel'' contains, however, '^ fifty pages which 
deserve to be bound in morocco." At a distance, 
and despite a superb setting and a magnificent style, 
the Profession de foi, which is somewhat of a digres- 
sion in an educational treatise, strikes us as an 
emphatic declamation of a vague, irresolute spirit- 
uaHsm. Its intrinsic value as a philosophical work 
is, however, of small importance. The fault we find 
with it is that it is the first word of rehgion which 
Rousseau made his pupil hear, if so it be that he 
really wishes to develop rehgious feeHng in him. 
That Rousseau's conception cannot be realized is 
indisputable: if Emile livedo hke all children, in a 



ROUSSEAU 47 

family and in the world, he would be a witness of 
exterior manifestations of religion on the part of his 
parents and fellow-citizens, and in his curiosity 
he would speedily ask what all this means : to hide 
God from him would be impossible. But that is not 
the question : what does matter, is to know whether 
the method employed by Rousseau responds to his 
intentions, whether it is of a nature to insure their 
success. I should think it excellent rather to pro- 
duce atheists. Will not Emile, who has dispensed 
with God for so long, be tempted to dispense with 
him altogether? In his desire to communicate to 
his pupil the sentiment of rehgion with which he him- 
self was so thoroughly imbued, Rousseau ought to 
have taken thought that here also a slow develop- 
ment is necessary, that Emile^s temporary atheism 
is in great danger of becoming fixed, quite as much 
as his egoism or his intellectual inertia. 

In this, as in many another particular, Rousseau 
has not followed his principle, which is to obey the 
laws of nature. Borrowing from him one of his 
metaphorical methods of expression, one would be 
tempted to imagine that ^^Nature," speaking, would 
address him nearly as follows : — 

''Truly, Rousseau, I should be very ungrateful, 
did I not hail you as one of the mortals who have 
most exerted themselves to restore my dominion. 



48 ROUSSEAU 

You have avowed yourself my faithful servant. 
Your incense has burned on my altars. You have 
practised, with sincere enthusiasm, a simple, frugal 
life, rustic pleasures, and innocent manners, in a 
society given up to luxurious tastes, to vice, and the 
compUcations of worldly Hfe. You have shown the 
dawn to people who used not to rise till noon. You 
have taken into the open air, into the broad sun- 
shine, Httle children who were fading away in the 
vitiated atmosphere of great towns. You have pro- 
tested against unnatural requirements and the 
caprice and artifice of fashion. You have endeav- 
ored to restore to humanity the simpUcity of the 
primal ages. ... All praise to you for this. 

'^But on how many points, beheving your ii 
spiration to come from me alone, you neverthelef 
have erred? I have no proof that you really ur 
derstand my nature. Everybody around you speak 
'of the mystery of nature's law.' Are you quit 
sure that you have thrown light upon this myster 
and penetrated it ? 

''What am I in your eyes? 'The sum total, yoL 
say, of humanity's instinctive tendencies before 
falsified by opinion.' You forget that 'opinion' 
has been in part formed by me ; that society is my 
work, that I founded it, and count for much in its 
organization. It seems that, in your mind, I have 



ROUSSEAU 49 

remained, congealing in my immobility the wild, 
primitive nature of the world's earhest ages. No, 
I am not a motionless, invariable force. I advance 
and keep abreast of progress. Some one who has no 
liking for you, but who has much wit, said humorously 
that you were making humanity move backwards 
to the barbarian epoch in which men walked on all 
fours and ate acorns. ... I grant you that Vol- 
taire exaggerates; but all the same, by vaunting 
the benefits of ignorance, by execrating arts and 
letters and all the works of civiUzation, have you 
not given excuse for this raillery ? 

^^ Heedlessly you ask that a clean sweep be made 
of ^^"erything that your ancestors have instituted, 
wh ,3as these institutions and customs have often 
bee .1 dictated to them by me. You wish, in edu- 
ca1 )n, to take in everything the side opposed to 
cuftom, but do you not see that ^custom,' which 
yo condemn in its entirety, could not have lasted 
frc M century to century, if it had not agreed in part 
wi 1 the laws over which I preside ? 

' I do not wish to take your errors in detail, but 
h(r3 is one. You rightly teach your dear Emile 
n.' ural religion alone, the one religion which I can 
a* ' nit. You are right, acclaiming behind me 
F )vidence, my creator, to oppose the internal and 
p ofound sentiment of conscience to vain and super- 



50 ROUSSEAU 

stitious forms of ritual. . . . But why, in this re- 
Hgious education, have you not acted in conformity 
with human progress itself, which, guided by me, has 
advanced from primitive superstition and the feeble 
light of later theology, to the fuller Hght of pure 
reason ? Your predecessor, Fenelon, who also pleased 
me greatly by the effort which he made to approach 
me nearly, was wiser; and if it really is necessary 
that men remain behevers, he understood that the 
one means of insuring their faith was to lay its 
foundations early in the child^s mind, by introducing 
to him at first, as I have done for humanity, per- 
ceptible ideas of God, imperfect, confused notions, 
whose superstitious imageries will gradually be dis- 
sipated by reason, in proportion as it develops, in 
order to exhibit, as far as human frailty permits, 
the pure and rational conception of Him who made 
me. . . . 

'^To sum up, Rousseau, your great error, the 
principal fault with which you will be reproached in 
succeeding centuries — for I foresee the future — is 
lack of belief in progress ; failure to divine the great 
law of the perpetual evolution of things. You have 
missed my most important characteristic, which is 
ceaseless motion. The word 'progress' comes 
often from your pen, but you always find it evil. 
It is for you, or nearly so, a synonym for decadence 



ROUSSEAU 51 

and corruption. . . . Your successors, on the con- 
trary, will consider progress as my supreme law, 
my essential principle, as the reason for the existence 
of humanity and the world. They will understand 
that nature is not the product of a day, that the suc- 
cessive acquisitions of inheritance form an integral 
portion of my substance. 

'^Let your errors be forgiven you, however, for 
70U have loved me greatly. Others will come after 
you who will also think that they have defined me. 
They also will, perchance, be mistaken ; for I am not 
as simple as may be thought ; I am infinitely complex, 
and I remain the impenetrable enigma, unfathom- 
able in its designs, whose solution will perhaps never 
be accompUshed by man. . . ." 



IV 

By his visions, even those which were in contra- 
diction with the nature whose patronage he was 
invoking, Rousseau has rendered signal service to 
the science and art of education. '^His errors/' said 
P. Girard, ^^are themselves wholesome warnings." 
By violently shaking traditionary usages, he awoke 
minds slumbering in routine, and by his flights of 
fancy he suggested and prepared just and practical 
solutions. 

But Emile contains also, and in large number, 
general views and detailed facts concerning the 
various branches of education which may be ac- 
cepted straightway almost without revision. These 
form, as it were, quite a cluster of flowers, which will 
blossom eternally in the garden of education. How 
many eloquent sayings, taken from Emile ^ do we 
constantly hear ? How many maxims, fresh in 1762, 
and become almost trivial at the present time, 
form the current coin of our pedagogics? How 
many others, wrongly neglected, will be found to be 
of value to us ? 

52 



ROUSSEAU 53 

It is now commonplace to recommend physical edu- 
cation. And Rousseau is not the first who, in mod- 
ern times, by a reversion to the ancient mode of Hfe, 
urged youth to bodily exercises. Ten years earUer, 
Turgot wrote, ^^We have especially forgotten that 
the formation of the body is a part of education." 
Rousseau, on this subject, refers his reader to Mon- 
taigne and Locke ; he might also have referred him 
to Rabelais. None the less do we praise him for 
having, in his turn, insisted forcibly on precepts 
more frequently recommended than practised. Let 
us be grateful to him for entering, as he does, into 
minute details on clothing, length of sleep, and food, 
thus clearing the way for the hygienists of childhood. 

Emile must strive to ^^ combine the vigor of an 
athlete with the reason of a sage." He must think 
like a philosopher and work like a peasant. Bodily 
exercise is not prejudicial to the operations of the 
mind. The two actions should proceed in harmony. 
Sports were not yet fashionable in Rousseau's 
time, and no one can blame him, when he prophesied 
the French Revolution, for not having also predicted 
the triumph of football. He at least recommends 
swimming, which everybody can learn. Riding is 
discarded, as too expensive. When he is twenty, 
however, Emile will take rides, without prejudice 
to his long excursions on foot. Rousseau, who had 



54 ROUSSEAU 

walked across France, from Paris to Lyons, could 
not help recommending pedestrian exercise. It is, 
however, of the infant, principally, that Rousseau 
thinks. Even before it can walk, it will be taken 
daily into the lields and meadows, to froHc, to run 
about as soon as it can. Let there be no longer any 
question of an effeminate, confined education, suit- 
able for maldng ^'scholars without muscle/' Health 
and physical force are to be considered first. Rous- 
seau comes back to this subject in his Considerations 
sur le gouvernement de Pologne. In this work he 
calls for the estabhshment in every school of a 
gymnasium for bodily exercise. ^^This is,'' says he, 
'Hhe most important item in education, not only as 
regards the formation of a robust constitution, but 
even more on the score of morality. ..." 

Indeed, it is not solely from hygienic motives, 
nor for the strengthening of the body, that Rousseau 
proposes his scheme of education in the country, with 
full hberty of movement, open-air excursions, and 
joyous gambols : he sees in physical exercise a means 
of development of moral power, — a prelude to edu- 
cation in courage and innate virtue. Rousseau 
seems to be inspired by memories of Spartan life 
or Stoic doctrine. His Emile is rigorously brought 
up ; he is inured to cold and heat and accustomed 
to privation. None of his caprices, supposing such 



ROUSSEAU 55 

possible in nature ^s pupil, are acceded to. If he 
is granted what he asks for, it is not on account of 
his having made the request, but because it is known 
that it is really needed. And Rousseau, who a mo- 
ment ago was wisely returning from paradox to 
common sense, now, inversely, and with equal 
facility, passes from equitable, just precept to ridicu- 
lous and absurd exaggeration. Emile is to walk 
barefoot ; he is to go about in the dark, without a 
candle or other Hght. He will, perhaps, learn in this 
way to have no fear of the dark, but will he not run 
the risk of a broken neck, ^Hhe eyes which he has 
at his finger-tips'' seeming scarcely sufficient to 
insure him against a slip or a fall ? Let us pass 
by these eccentricities in which Rousseau's genius 
goes astray, and let us be satisfied with proving that 
he anticipated all those who, nowadays, demand an 
active, manly education, which shall produce vigor- 
ous men, dexterous of Hmb and capable of standing 
face to face with danger; ready and able to render 
practical assistance both to themselves and others ; 
truly equipped for fife as regards its material oc- 
cupations as well as its difficulties and moral trials. 
To view Rousseau's famous theory on the neces- 
sity of serving an apprenticeship in a manual occu- 
pation from the utihtarian standpoint alone, would 
be to misinterpret his intentions. Undoubtedly, he 



56 ROUSSEAU 

saw in it a resource, an assured livelihood, should 
there come a time of adversity and ruin. A presci- 
ent thought for the rich man, suddenly reduced to 
poverty and obliged to work for his Uving, is not 
foreign to Rousseau^s scheme. ^^We are drawing 
near the age of revolutions. Who can say what 
will then become of you?'' If, however, he makes 
Emile a joiner, not a mock joiner, but a real workman, 
who attends his workshop regularly, and does not 
allow even the visit of his betrothed to distract him 
from his occupation — there are other motives gov- 
erning him : he wishes to reinstate work, and more 
especially, manual work. ^^Rich or poor, whosoever 
does not work is a cheat.'' There is also the peda- 
gogical consideration that it is not alone the head, 
the brain of a man, which must be exercised, as 
though the brain were the entire man. We should be 
able to use our hands as well as our reason, and 
because it develops physical capability, endurance, 
exertion, and practical acquirements, manual labor 
is good for everybody. Rousseau would have en- 
dorsed these recent words of M. Jules Lemaitre: 
^^Our collegians' time, wasted twice over by them, 
since they spend it in not learning a dead language 
which, if learned, would be of Httle use to them, 
might better be employed, I do not say in studying 
living tongues, natural science, and geography, — 



ROUSSEAU 57 

that is too apparent, — but in games, gymnastics, 
and joinery. . . /' Especially would he be de- 
hghted to see in what honor the manual occupation 
to which he gave the preference is held in certain 
modern schools, in England, for example, at Bedale 
College, the protot3^e of M. Demohns' des Roches 
school, where gardening and farm work is succeeded 
by exercise in woodwork. The pupils are seen 
bringing real enthusiasm to the making of boxes, 
racks, and book shelves, on which they then place 
books bound by themselves. 

The education of the sense is intimately connected 
with that of the body. ^^Not only have we arms 
and legs, we also have eyes and ears.'^ In this, again, 
Rousseau is an excellent guide. Pestalozzi, and all 
the patrons of the intuitive method, all those who 
preach the lessons of things, are only his disciples. 
Everything else depends on the education of the 
senses. Rousseau has sometimes been compared 
with Descartes. He would have been the ' ' Descartes 
of sensibility '' following the Descartes of under- 
standing. It is more accurate to Hken him to Con- 
dillac, whom he classed ^^ among the best reasoners 
and most profound metaphysicians of his time.^' 
Like the author of the Trait e des sensations, he 
accepts the maxim, ^^ Everything that enters the 
understanding comes through the senses.^' The 



58 ROUSSEAU 

senses are 'Hhe first faculties to form in us : the first, 
accordingly, to be cultivated." To this cultivation 
Rousseau devotes the twelve years of childhood, 
satisfied if, '^ after this long journey through the 
region of sensations to the boundaries of childish 
reason,'' he has succeeded in forming Emile into a 
sensitive being, able to see, hear, feel, calculate dis- 
tance, and compare quantities and weights. . . . 
^'Yonder is a very ^ high cherry tree; how can we 
manage to gather some cherries? Will the ladder 
in the neighboring barn do ? There is a very wide 
brook; will one of the planks lying in the yard be 
long enough to cross by? . . ." 

Emile, who uses the plane adroitly later on, is 
clever in the use of his fingers at an early age. Rous- 
seau, who does not say much of how he taught him 
to write, being ashamed, as he says, of troubUng 
over such trifles, — and yet speUing is not taught by 
nature, — takes great interest in the study of draw- 
ing: '^Children, who are great imitators, all try 
to draw." In these attempts, however, it is not 
the art of drawing for its own sake which Rousseau 
values so highly, it is more on account of the profit 
accruing from it to the training of the senses and 
the organs of the body. Practice in drawing makes 
the eye more accurate and the hand more flexible. 
The child, of course, is only to draw from nature ; 



ROUSSEAU 59 

he is not to imitate imitations; objects will be his 
only models. Let us add that all idea of beauty is 
absent from this first initiation into the material 
representation of things. Rousseau is not thinking 
of producing an artist ; the result will, at most, be 
a geometrician; moreover, if he recommends draw- 
ing, it is less for Emile to imitate objects than to be- 
come acquainted with them. 

Sensations prepare ideas. By perceiving objects 
clearly, Emile trains himself to judge, that is to 
say, to grasp their affinities. His first judgments, 
however, are confined strictly to the domain of tangible 
knowledge. He must obtain his instruction from 
actual objects and not from words. '^Do not talk 
to the child of matters which it cannot understand. 
Use no descriptions, no eloquence, no figurative lan- 
guage. Be satisfied with introducing him to ob- 
jects opportunely. Let us transform our sensations 
into ideas, but without leaping at one bound from 
perceptible to intellectual objects. — Turgot had 
already said: 'I wish abstract and general notions 
to come to children in the same way that they come 
to men, — by degrees, and by a regular progress from 
sensible ideas.' — Let us pass slowly from one sen- 
sible idea to another. In general, never replace a 
thing by its representation unless it be impossible 
to show the thing itself. I dishke explanations and 



60 ROUSSEAU 

discourses. Things ? things ? I cannot repeat often 
enough that we attach too much importance to 
words; our chattering education produces nothing 
but chatterers. . , J^ 

A time comes, however, when the employment of 
words and abstract ideas is forced upon us, when 
something more than perceptible objects must be 
studied. In the selection of studies which he offers 
Emile, Rousseau is obedient to a principle, a single 
criterion, — that of utility. This great visionary is 
a utihtarian. His programme certainly is short : it 
is calculated to displease those who demand a com- 
plete education, universal knowledge for a youth. 
But in his practical tendencies he inaugurates, with 
omissions, the programmes of reahstic instruction 
which will be adopted more and more for fresh gen- 
erations. Rousseau may well be the father of this 
instruction which our contemporaries are endeavor- 
ing, not without gropings, to estabhsh and organize 
under the fine title of up-to-date education. The 
name is found: the thing itself is by no means 
reaUzed. 

However this may be, the end in view is now 
settled. A fact which must be recognized is that 
intellectual education should be a direct preparation 
for life, and that the current system is in part bad 
and doomed to disappear, because, between the 



ROUSSEAU 61 

ultra-speculative studies which it inflicts on youth 
and the reahties of existence, between the scholar's 
Mfe and the man's calling, there is a profound disa- 
greement, — what Taine called an '^incompatibihty." 
Goethe was even then saying, fifty years later than 
Rousseau, however: ^^So much theoretical knowl- 
edge, so much science, is what exhausts our young 
people, both physically and morally. They lack 
the physical and moral energy necessary to make 
a suitable entry into the world. . . .'' 

Rousseau's language is to the same effect. It has 
been seen that he wished to endow Emile with physi- 
cal energy. He was no less thoughtful for moral 
energy. This philosopher, thought to be lost in the 
land of chimera, says : ^^ When I see that, at the most 
active time of life, youths are kept to purely specu- 
lative studies, and are afterwards, without the least 
experience, cast upon the world and into business, 
it seems to me the offence against society is as great 
as that against nature ; it does not, therefore, surprise 
me that so few people know how to order their con- 
duct. What bizarre deception causes the persistent 
teaching of so many useless things, whilst the ^art 
of action' counts for nothing? Nominally, we are 
formed for society, and we are instructed as though 
each of us had to pass his life in a cell, engaged in 
solitary thought." 



62 ROUSSEAU 

^^The art of action/^ is not this the watchword of 
future education ? To Rousseau belongs the credit 
of having uttered it, though he may not have had 
the talent necessary to combine the means which can 
make it effective. There is some temptation to reply 
to him that it is not by rearing Emile in solitude, ^^as 
though he had to pass his Hfe in solitary thought" 
in the fields, that a youth is made fit for actual 
human hfe. But what does one more inconsistency 
matter? Rousseau, at least, understood that in- 
struction must be reheved of all the superfluity of 
show study. He, however, carries this also to excess. 
How can we refrain from reproving him for the way 
in which he despises the old classical studies, the 
ancient languages in particular, which he dares to 
describe as '^a useless feature of education." As 
an educator he went too far in rejecting the literary 
sources, by draughts from which, as a thinker and 
writer, he formed his genius. Men of letters will 
protest, and not unreasonably, against such culpa- 
ble infidehty; but all men of good sense will praise 
him for having shown that the aim of education 
is not the accumulation of sterile knowledge in the 
memory; that it is the formation of inteUigence by 
a discreet introduction to a moderate selection of 
useful studies, giving preference to attainments 
which nourish the mind and train it to be ready 



ROUSSEAU 63 

for action, rather than to those attainments which 
are only a useless ornament. 

Emile has reached the age of fifteen: his short 
studies have come to an end. He has little knowl- 
edge, but he is prepared for knowledge of every kind, 
and this is the most important consideration. Do 
not take him for a scholar: he is not meant to be 
one ; but he has a taste for knowledge. His natural 
curiosity has been aroused. According to the say- 
ing which Rousseau borrows from Montaigne, if not 
taught, he is at least ^^ teachable." No prejudice 
has perverted his mind or impaired the accuracy of 
his judgment. He knows nothing on authority; 
he has acquired all his knowledge for himself. He 
has not been taught the facts themselves, so much as 
the method of finding them out. He has been told 
to look, and he has found. Thus will he continue 
all his Hfe on the path to knowledge, which he has 
been shown, '^long, stupendous, tedious to follow.'^ 

In Rousseau's methods of instruction we perceive 
two excellent tendencies : firstly, that, in order to 
thoroughly master what is learned, a personal effort 
is required, a research, a sort of original discovery, 
and not merely an effort of memory and mechanical 
acquisition; secondly, that the most important 
thing is not the knowledge acquired at the end of 
study, the fight baggage of attainments which serve 



64 ROUSSEAU 

too often as an excuse for mental slumber after 
leaving college, but the desire to enlarge one's 
knowledge and aptitude for acquiring it. Those 
who draw up the overladen, encyclopaedic pro- 
grammes of our education, before beginning delib- 
erations which almost always result in yet another 
burden, even when schemes of reduction are the 
order of the day, should read over and meditate 
well upon this pleasing passage from Emile: ''When 
I see a man carried away by his love for knowledge, 
hastening from one alluring study to another, with- 
out knowing where to stop, I think I see a child 
gathering shells upon the seashore. At first he 
loads himself with them ; then, tempted by others, 
he throws these away and gathers more. At last, 
weighed down by so many, he ends by throwing all 
away, and returning empty-handed. . . .^' 'Is not 
this a very clever and correct picture of many modern 
scholars, weighed down by their burden of useless 
acquirements, embarrassed with ideas of every kind, 
disgusted by wearisome studies, and finally leaving 
college almost empty-handed ? o Rousseau attaches 
himself here to the great tradition of French peda- 
gogics, a tradition too often set at naught in our 
schemes for study. It advocates, as Nicole said, 
^Hhe use of knowledge only as an instrument for the 
formation of reason"; which, of course, applies to 



ROUSSEAU 65 

knowledge only in so far as it plays a part in that 
general culture aimed at by secondary education. 

If we now examine in detail the programme of 
utiHtarian studies which Rousseau intends for Emile, 
we shall be surprised more than once, both on ac- 
count of what he includes and what he omits. 
Rousseau is the most disconcerting and deceptive of 
educators. Thus, he forbids the study of history, 
and this is one of his most provoking paradoxes. 
In this he is, however, logical with himself. Since 
Emile is ^Ho be removed from humankind," he must 
be denied knowledge of the dead as well as contact 
with the living. History is the great agent by 
which social consciousness is developed; now, in 
his early education, Emile is only an individuahst, 
a perfect egoist, without any social sentiment. It 
is known, moreover, what special argument Rous- 
seau advanced and upheld to excuse the omission 
of history ; namely, that a child is incapable of un- 
derstanding it. History is as much out of his reach 
as the philosophic idea of God: as though there 
were not a history for children, ^ history made up of 
description, narrative, and great men's lives. For- 
tunately, in the matter of history, as in so many 
other things, Rousseau contradicted himself, and 
to rectify his errors or correct his semi-voluntary 
paradoxes, it is sufficient to appeal from Rousseau 



66 ROUSSEAU 

to Rousseau. As legislator of the Polish govern- 
ment, his language is quite different from that used 
by the theorist of Emile, Far from condemning 
history^ he will be found rather to carry it to 
excess. 

In language which, in its animation, recalls the 
words used by Rabelais to extol the study of natural 
science when he makes Gargantua say to his son: 
^^I want you to be acquainted with the fish of every 
sea, river, and spring, — with all the birds of the 
air, the trees and shrubs of the forest, and all the 
herbs of the earth; . . .'' similarly, Rousseau says: 
^^I want the young Pole, when learning to read, to 
read things concerning his country ; so that when he 
is ten years old he shall be acquainted with all its 
products ; when twelve, all its provinces, roads, and 
towns; when fifteen, its entire history; when six- 
teen, all its laws; thus, every fine deed which has 
been done, and every noted man who shall have 
lived, in all Poland, shall fill his heart and mind." 
The education of a httle citizen, a future patriot, 
could not have a better preparation. Let us take 
note, however, that Rousseau's retraction is not 
complete ; he speaks only of national history, leav- 
ing the general history of mankind, which has no 
interest for him, a sealed book to his pupil. 

Emile, having been cheated of knowledge of the 



ROUSSEAU 67 

ethical world, will, in compensation, be nourished 
with knowledge of the material world. The study of 
nature must come before everything else. Is not 
the same thing thought at the present day by the 
educators of the United States, who attach so much 
importance to knowledge of natural truths ? What 
does cause surprise, is that, in his programme, 
Rousseau should put astronomy in the forefront. 
Auguste Comte also mentions it first in his cata- 
logue of sciences and in his system of positive edu- 
cation. One has the right to ask why. Utility 
cannot be its recommendation. Emile is to travel, 
but he is not intended to navigate, and it does not 
seem at all hkely that he would find a knowledge of 
the constellations and heavenly bodies of any use 
to him. Likely enough what decided Rousseau was 
the fact that astronomy, physical astronomy at 
least, is one of the sciences most suitable for the 
appUcation of his beloved method, — the method of 
conscious and direct observation of things. Emile, 
who does not know what a class room or a study is, 
gains his knowledge in the open; he contemplates 
nature's great spectacles, and reflects in the presence 
of the starry sky. 

In virtue of the same system, astronomy is fol- 
lowed by physical science and geography, keeping 
to tangible and concrete studies in which abstrac- 



68 ROUSSEAU 

tion plays the least important part. Emile learns 
geography without maps, during his walks and in 
presence of the actual objects. ^'Why all these 
representations ? . . . I recollect seeing somewhere 
a text-book on geography which began thus : ^ What 
is the world? — A pasteboard globe.' . . .'' The 
only method of preventing these fallacies is to in- 
troduce to the child the thing itself and not its arti- 
ficial representation. 

An elementary knowledge of astronomy, physics, 
and geography will be practically everything till the 
age of fifteen is reached. Has Emile learned gram- 
mar? Not otherwise than by using his mother- 
tongue and hearing his master talk : ^^ Always speak 
correctly in his presence." At all events, at this 
age, he as yet knows nothing of either ancient or 
modern literature. Poets and prose-writers of every 
degree are as unknown to him as historians. Rous- 
seau, before Condorcet and so many others, is already 
an expert in scientific education; but in science 
itself he rejects all that is pure speculation and 
abstract generaUty. He admits that there is a 
chain of general truths by which all sciences are 
linked to common principles and successively un- 
folded. But '^with this we have nothing to do" in 
the formation of the mind. ^^ There is another, 
altogether different, which shows each object as the 



ROUSSEAU 69 

cause of another, and always points out the one 
following. This order, which by a perpetual curi- 
osity keeps ahve the attention demanded by all, 
is the one followed by most men, and of all others 
necessary with children/' Thus, in the study of 
physics, arrangements will be made to connect all 
experiments by a kind of deduction, so that, assisted 
by this connection, children can arrange them 
methodically in their minds, and recall them when 
required. All this, however, only deals with the 
estabHshment of a material order between percep- 
tible truths. To the senses, Rousseau subordinates 
even the deduction of ideas and their Hnking to- 
gether. No doubt it is on this account that mathe- 
matics do not figure in Rousseau's programme. 
Emile, who is forbidden to read even La Fontaine's 
Fables, on the ground that he would not understand 
them, does not seem to be any more acquainted with 
arithmetical rules. . . . Decidedly his instruction 
is insufficient and hmited. Rousseau had none of 
that holy horror of ignorance which characterizes 
later educators: '^Ignorance," said he, ''never did 
harm ; error alone is pernicious." Education has an 
importance beyond instruction. ''We prefer good 
men to scholars." 

Rousseau is more happily inspired in the educa- 
tion of the will than he is when dealing with the 



70 ROUSSEAU 

mind. Despite appearances, and despite the con- 
tinual presence of a guardian whose surveillance 
would not seem altogether favorable to the develop- 
ment of individuality, Emile is really brought up in 
liberty. It is certain, and we do not forget it, that 
Rousseau was chiefly deficient in character and 
energy. He could never overcome temptation. 
^'It was always impossible for me to act against 
my inchnation.'' All through his hfe he was the 
plaything of circumstances, the victim of his pas- 
sions. This, however, rather disposed him to desire 
for Emile a better education than the one from 
which he himself suffered, an education of a kind to 
accustom a child to act on his own initiative, in 
fine, an education of '^ self-government": '^The 
child must be left to himself, both as regards body 
and mind. The boon of freedom is worth many 
scars." 

By emancipating the child, Rousseau intends, 
primarily, to make him happy, and that at once; 
for the poor Httle one may die young, and before 
he dies he must taste hfe. Now a child^s happiness, 
like a man's, consists in the exercise of libert3^ 
Rousseau had a sincere affection for children. In 
all his wise recommendations concerning the care 
to be taken with an infant, an inspiration of ten- 
derness almost unknown before his time may be 



ROUSSEAU 71 

detected, a lively feeling of pity for these frail 
creatures who are, as a first consideration, to be 
made to hve. What a number of tender things he 
has written on children ! What treasures of affec- 
tion left unused by this culpable father! '^Nature 
made children to be loved and succored. . . . 
Does it not seem as though a child displays such a 
sweet face and affecting manner only that every- 
thing which comes near it may be touched by its 
feebleness and may hasten to its assistance?" 
Tutors of all ages will have to draw inspiration from 
cautions hke the following: '^If you do not open 
your heart, others^ hearts will remain closed to 
you. It is your care and affection that you must 
give." 

But beyond the child^s present, and the joy in life 
which he wishes to insure for it immediately, Rous- 
seau also thought of the future, and the require- 
ments of social Hfe. By the independence which 
he grants it from the cradle, when he abohshes the 
imprisonment of swaddhng clothes; as later, in 
boyhood^s years, when he wars against prohibitions 
and verbal injunctions, in order to substitute for 
them instruction from facts alone and the hving 
lessons of example, — ^^ Example, example ! lacking 
this, success with children was never obtained;" — 
when, finally, he appeals to all that is spontaneous 



72* ROUSSEAU 

in the intelligence and personal in the will of his 
pupil, it is evident that he wishes, in this way, to 
form men of stronger physique, more vigorous 
morals, and greater control over their actions, than 
the scholars of old-style colleges, in the austerity of 
their cloistered Ufe, were prepared to become, and 
than the students of our modern high schools are, 
even at the present day, in spite of the achievement 
of so much progress. 

Note, however, that Emile's education is by no 
means one of complacency and enervating laxity: 
rather is he submitted to a regimen of severity. 
His room is in every way like a peasant's. And if 
Rousseau has made a gleam of joy shine in his Ufe 
by the Hberty which he grants him, he none the 
less wishes the child to know how to bear suffering. 
Suffering will leave Emile stronger, and is the first 
thing that he must learn. Primarily, he is thus 
early armed against the evils which existence has 
in store for him. But he also learns to sympathize 
with the misfortunes of others. 

Man is an apprentice, with affliction for his master. 

EarHer than De Musset, Rousseau said in his fine 
prose, '^The man who is ignorant of affliction, knows 
neither human tenderness nor the sweetness of 
commiseration." 

In spite of the sort of antisocial sequestration 



ROUSSEAU 73 

which Rousseau imposed on 6mile for fifteen years, 
it must not be imagined that he gave up all idea of 
making a feehng, loving being of him a little later. 
Even as a child, he must be shown '^this world^s 
unfortunates." The spirit of fraternity fills Rous- 
seau ^s generous soul to overflowing: '^Proclaim 
yourself aloud the protector of the unhappy. Be 
just, humane, and kindly. Do not give alms alone, 
give charity." Rousseau advances toward modern 
sociahsm. Note, for example, this bold reflection: 
'^AVhen poor people were wilUng there should be 
rich people, the rich promised to take care of those 
without means of subsistence, either from their 
property or labor." Arrived at man's estate, 
Emile spends a part of his time in doing good to 
those around him. When in love, he does not allow 
the thought of Sophie alone to absorb him. He 
interrupts his attentions to his betrothed that he 
may act as a true philanthropist. He travels the 
country ; he examines the land, its productions, and 
their cultivation; he himself ploughs on occasion. 
His knowledge of natural history is utihzed for the 
benefit of the cultivators; he teaches them better 
methods. He visits the peasants in their homes; 
and, after inquiring into their needs, he helps them 
with his person and his money. Does a peasant 
fall ill? He has him cared for; he himself attends 



74 ROUSSEAU 

to him. Simple medicine, indeed, and such as can 
be allowed by an enemy of doctors, consisting, as it 
does, in more substantial nourishment. He makes 
his future wife a partner in these good works: he 
takes her to visit the poor, to see a laborer who 
has broken his leg, and whose wife is about to be 
confined. ''With her gentle, light hand,'' Sophie 
puts dressings on the wounded man : she waits on, 
pities, and consoles him. 

By birth and extraction Rousseau was of the 
people. He remained one of them by the simpHcity 
of his tastes, living like a laborer, fond of associat- 
ing with the lowly, though at times he did not 
disdain the complaisance of great lords, and was not 
insensible to the caresses of great ladies. Does this 
imply that in his educational projects he worked 
directly for the people and for the people's instruc- 
tion ? No. Emile, if not a gentleman hke Locke's 
pupil, is at any rate of the middle classes, rich and 
well born. But by the fact that he eliminated ancient 
languages and all expensive studies, and replaced 
''book" education by the simple, natural cultivation 
of the talents which every human creature brings 
into the world at its birth, Rousseau suggested 
the idea of the universal emancipation of inteUi- 
gence; he inspired the democratic idea of making 
instruction general. He did not wish for the "cere- 



ROUSSEAU 75 

monious'' education of the rich, for what he still 
called '^exclusive'' education, which only tends to 
distinguish from the common people those who have 
received it. Moreover, the object being to make 
men, and not scholars, the poor would, in truth, 
^^ require no education.^' Freed by their Hfe of 
toil from all the conventions of society, subjected 
to nature's laws alone, ^Hhe poor can of themselves 
become men." 

Rousseau — and for it he has been severely 
blamed — wished to form, not a man of a certain 
station, or of a settled profession, but just a man. 
He thought too much, says Taine, of '^man in the 
abstract,'' and not enough of actual man, such as he 
is made by the circumstances of time and place, 
and as he should be trained by education, so that he 
may be fitted for his place in hfe. '^Whether my 
pupil be intended for the army, the church, or the 
bar, matters httle to me. Before he adopts the 
vocation of his parents, nature calls upon him to 
be a man. How to hve is the business I wish to 
teach him. On leaving my hands, he will not, I 
admit, be a magistrate, a soldier, or a priest : first 
of all he will be a man. All that a man should be, 
he can be." Let us give praise to Rousseau for 
having reminded men that they have a personal 
destiny, that first and foremoB-t they should, if pos- 



76 ROUSSEAU 

sible, set up and strengthen in themselves the prin- 
ciples of human dignity. Let us, however, censure 
him for keeping too strictly to the absolute, without 
considering the contingencies and relative conditions 
which require the individual to graft on the common 
stem that branch of special acquirements which the 
place that he will occupy in hfe exacts, as a con- 
dition of being worthily held. He did not suffi- 
ciently reflect on the principle, which is becoming 
more and more insistent on recognition, that edu- 
cation must be diversified and speciaUzed in a score 
of forms, that it may be in conformity with the 
various exigencies of social [labor, no less than in 
correspondence with the multiplicity of individual 
talents. Rousseau has erred in a manner analogous 
to those religious educators who, forgetful of the 
present hfe, and thoughtful only for the hfe to 
come, — which alone has any value in their eyes, — 
aspire only to the rearing of a pure and virtuous 
creature for the bhss of hfe everlasting. The 
philosopher of nature and ideal humanity joins 
hands, without suspecting it, with the mystical 
constructors of God's City. When his '^one and 
indivisible" education is finished, Emile may be the 
type of a man; but he must not be expected to be 
an engineer, a doctor, or a lawyer. Of what use, 
then, will he be in society, since he can bring no 



ROUSSEAU 77 

special attainments beyond those proper to his trade 
of joiner ? 

It is well that Emile has learned a manual trade ; 
it is well that he is '^fit for all stations of life '^ ; but 
perhaps no harm would ensue from the addition of 
a professional preparation for one of the functions 
to which society calls men. 

At times, however, the practical spirit awakens in 
Rousseau and timidly takes its revenge. After he 
has betrothed Emile to Sophie, he forces him to 
leave her and travel abroad for two years. By a 
fresh contradiction, Rousseau, who so long kept 
Emile from coming into contact with his own com- 
patriots, and did not introduce him into society till 
he was twenty, now enlarges the circle of his social 
connections to the extent of wishing him to enter 
into relations with the men of other countries. 
Travel, says he, forms part of education : travel, not 
for pleasure, however, but for instruction and study, 
a kind of ^^ scholastic course ^^ abroad. Emile must 
be acquainted with the genius and ways of foreign 
nations ; truly it was wasted time to forbid so long 
the reading of histories ! It is true that books are 
worth nothing. It is with his eyes that Emile should 
see foreign things, as all other things. Rousseau 
never abandons the method of direct observation. 
If we are to beheve him, the French are, of all the 



78 ROUSSEAU 

peoples of the world, the greatest travellers. Was 
this true in 1762 ? We doubt it. At all events, it 
is regrettable that it is not now the case. Emile 
travels, then. So that, in the course of his wander- 
ings, he be not turned aside and diverted from the 
serious objects of his observations, Rousseau has 
taken care that he is enamoured before his departure. 
The love sworn to Sophie is to preserve him from all 
dissipation, and to shelter him from passion and 
vice in the great towns which he visits. On his 
travels, Emile devotes himself entirely to his obser- 
vations, which are not, however, concerned with 
monuments and antiquities, or on the relics and ruins 
of the past. That is of no interest ; it is the present 
which should be known. Emile is not an archae- 
ologist. His attention is directed especially to ques- 
tions of government, to customs and laws. He will 
study poUtics and comparative legislation on the 
spot. And when he returns to his native land, he 
can usefully examine the institutions of France, in 
order to judge of them by comparison. Perhaps he 
may deem them inferior and bad, and will conse- 
quently be moved to the ambition of contributing 
to their reformation. On the contrary, this cos- 
mopohtan of a few months' standing may have 
become a more ardent patriot, attached to his own 
country the more for being better informed regard- 



ROUSSEAU 79 

ing the vices and evils of other countries. Let us 
be assured, if Rousseau had Uved in our time, he 
would have joined his eloquent rebukes to those of 
the present-day educators, who urge young French- 
men to become colonists. It was not a fit time to 
think of that in 1762, when, through the fault of its 
monarchy, France was on the point of losing her 
magnificent colonial empire. 

The most important of the results of Emile^s 
travel is that he learned 'Hwo or three foreign 
languages. '^ Rousseau did not give him much time 
for that ; difficulty of achievement, as we know, does 
not trouble him. It is scarcely apparent how Emile, 
who as yet has studied no foreign language, living 
or dead, is able so rapidly to learn German and 
EngUsh. What matters this? The main thing is 
that here again Rousseau pointed out the goal and 
drew attention to the importance of studying the 
Uving languages. Further, in the course of his 
travels, Emile took care to cultivate acquaintance 
with foreigners of parts, so that, having returned 
home, he continues to correspond with them. This 
exchange of letters, which lasts his whole fife, will 
raise his thoughts and sentiments above national 
prejudice, and will make him a citizen of the 
world. Thus did Rousseau prepare the way for 
the modern educators, who protest against French- 



80 ROUSSEAU 

men confining themselves to devout contemplation 
of themselves, and who exhort them to mix with 
the universal Hfe of humanity, that they may see 
and comprehend the world outside. 



Emile is a perfect man ; to be worthy of becoming 
his wife, Sophie should be an ideal woman. But 
Rousseau is far from successful in this second part 
of his task; and woman's education, as displayed 
by him, is certainly not so well understood as man's. 

It is with special care, however, that Rousseau 
wrote the fifth book of Eynile, which is almost en- 
tirely devoted to feminine instruction. He com- 
posed it, he says, ^'in a continual ecstasy'' (he was 
at the time the guest of the duchess of Luxembourg, 
at Montmorency), ^^in the midst of woods and 
streams and choirs of birds of every kind, with the 
fragrance of the orange-blossom in the air"; and 
he in part attributes ^Hhe rather fresh coloring" 
of these pages, more poetical than philosophical, to 
the pleasant impressions which he experienced in 
this earthly paradise. But he Uved there with his 
Therese, — a companion and model ill-fitted to 
assist him in the conception of an educated woman. 
He was constantly at the mansion and received 
visits from briUiant and titled ladies, — a compan- 

81 



82 ROUSSEAU 

ionship ill-suited perhaps to the conception of a 
simple, strong woman, whose Ukeness he wished to 
sketch. The material surroundings themselves, also 
the delicious abode at Mont-Louis was more con- 
ducive to re very than analysis. The book of 
Sophie is only a pleasant idyl. The poet and 
novehst decidedly gain the upper hand in it. Of 
all things that Rousseau fails to understand, said 
Saint-Marc Girardin, it is woman that he under- 
stands least. Certain of her refinements, her noble 
dignity and pure moral grandeur have, at all events, 
eluded him. He has for her more tenderness and 
loving adoration than true respect and esteem. Even 
in the most exquisite descriptions of his heroine, 
looked at both physically and morally, an indefin- 
able, sensual appetite is always to be detected, — a 
memory of common or worldly women, coquettish 
and artificial, whom he had known and loved. 

Sophie, moreover, is not altogether an imaginary 
being. When outlining her lineaments, Rousseau 
asserts that he had in his mind an actual model. 
Sophie existed then, and the name alone was of his 
invention. Dead in the springtime of her life, he 
merely '^revived" her to make ^Hhis lovable girl" 
Emile^s companion. The story is dramatic and 
touching. Having read Telemachus, at the age of 
twenty the real Sophie was smitten with love for 



ROUSSEAU 83 

Fenelon^s hero, and, being unable to find in the world 
a youth Uke him, she died of unsatisfied love, of 
languor and despair. Fenelon is thus responsible 
for the death of a maiden. . . . How does it come 
about that this tragic episode of real hfe did not 
prevent Rousseau from making his Sophie, who was 
the image of the other, too sensitive and romantic ? 
It is true that, overtaken with tardy remorse, he 
seems to have reaHzed the vanity of his efforts, and 
himself emphasized the insufficiency and inefficacy 
of his scheme of feminine education, when, with 
strange irony, in the Roman des Solitaires, he shows 
us the virtuous Sophie become an unfaithful wife, 
although she saw in woman's misconduct nothing 
but ^^ misery, disorder, unhappiness, opprobrium, 
and ignominy. '^ 

Between Emile's education and that which Sophie 
receives, there is more than a contrast, there is an 
abyss. Rousseau emancipated Emile; he enslaves 
Sophie. To the same degree that he showed him- 
self bold in his views on the '^ foundation '^ of men, 
is he timid, backward, and conservative in his ideas 
on woman's education. The apostle of individual- 
ism renounces his doctrine. He subordinates woman 
to man; of her he makes an humble subject whose 
only value Hes in ministering to her husband's hap- 
piness. He confines her strictly to her duties as 



84 ROUSSEAU 

daughter, wife, and mother. If he invites her elo- 
quently to fulfil her obHgations as a teacher, he for- 
gets to provide her, by a sufficiently well-developed 
instruction, with the means of acquitting herself 
worthily in this great mission. Finally, he does not 
appear to suppose that woman also has a claim to 
acquire personalty, that she legitimately aspires to 
extension of her acquirements and development of 
her faculties, so that, with her enhghtened intelh- 
gence and emancipated reason, she may truly be 
man^s equal and, indeed, the ^'abstract woman." 

Rousseau^s maxim is that woman should be obe- 
dient to man, that her existence is, as it were, con- 
ditional on that of man. Listen to these continual 
repetitions which, like a monotonous refrain, re- 
appear on every page: ''The whole education of 
women ought to be relative to men. . . . Woman 
is specially made to please men, to be useful to 
them, to make themselves loved and honored by 
them, to rear them when young, to care for them 
when grown up, to advise them, to console them, to 
render their Hves agreeable and sweet to them, — 
these are the duties of women at all times, and should 
be taught to them from their childhood. . . . All 
their caprices must be overcome so as to make them 
submissive to the will of others. . . . Dependence 
is the woman's natural condition. . . . Woman is 



ROUSSEAU 85 

created to be all her life subject to man and to man's 
judgment. ... It is a law of nature that woman 
shall obey man. . . . She is created to give way to 
man, and to suffer even his injustice. . . .'' 

There is, then, no idea of educating Sophie for 
herself. Rousseau does not, at heart, admit the 
equahty of the sexes. He says of woman that she 
is ^^an imperfect man," that in many respects she 
is only '^a grown-up child." I am aware that 
Rousseau, with his customary inconsistency, con- 
tradicts himself in other passages: '^The question 
of superiority," he says, ^^must not be urged: 
differences account for all. . . . Each sex has 
qualities suited to its destiny and part in Ufe. . . . 
It is perhaps one of the marvels of nature that two 
beings so similar, and at the same time so differently 
constituted, should have been made. ..." But 
he insists upon these differences: '^It is demon- 
strated that man and woman are not constituted 
aUke, either in temperament or character." By 
speaking of differences, does not one singularly 
compromise the idea of equality? 

What, then, is Rousseau's idea of the character 
and temperament proper to woman ? He expounds 
it to us twice : first, somewhat ponderously in the 
long pages of general philosophy which begin the 
fifth book of Entile, and form a kind of outhne of 



86 ROUSSEAU 

feminine psychology ; and later, with a quite poetic 
charm, when, putting away abstract considerations, 
he raises the curtain to show Sophie in her grace 
and beauty. 

Woman is weak. She is passionate: ^'If she 
pretends to be unable to bear the Ughtest burdens, 
it is not only to appear dehcate, it is to arrange ex- 
cuses for herself and the right to be feeble should 
occasion require." Her heart feeds on unUmited 
desires of love; it is true that ''the Supreme Being 
added modesty '^ in order to counterbalance and 
restrain them. Sophie, hke all women, is a natural 
coquette. She is fond of finery, almost from the 
moment of her birth. She is not displeased to dis- 
play ''her well-turned leg." She is inquisitive, too 
much so. She is artful, and necessarily so, to com- 
pensate for what she lacks in strength. "You tell 
me that httle Sophie is very artful," wrote Rous- 
seau to the prince of Wurtemberg, "so much the 
better! ..." Artfulness is a natural talent, and 
everything natural is "good and right." The in- 
stinct of artfulness, then, must be cultivated. Rous- 
seau, however, is good enough to admit that it is 
as well "to prevent its abuse." Sophie is talkative. 
She is imperious. She is by nature a glutton — 
here Rousseau forgets that he has declared all 
primitive instincts to be excellent. Does not the 



ROUSSEAU 87 

doctrine of original goodness apply to woman with 
as much force as to man ? Sophie is temperate, but 
she has become so. . . . 

So much for the defects, and we have minimized 
them. The portrait is not overdrawn. Let us now 
examine the other side: the good, the qualities. 
Woman is more docile than man. She has more 
deUcacy than man. She is more skilful in reading 
the human heart. Her dominant passion is virtue. 
Let us note, moreover, that it is never certain 
whether Rousseau means to speak of woman in 
general, or of the exceptional creature which he 
has personified in Sophie. Her chief happiness 
is to make her parents happy. She is chaste and 
honest till her last sigh: here the ideal woman is 
obviously intended, the one of whom he says, 
'^A virtuous woman is almost the equal of the 
angels! ..." 

But woman, in general, is not man's equal. A 
charming being whom Rousseau idoHzes, yet none 
the less binds down to the subordinate position of 
her part as younger sister, and inferior in the human 
family. Her natural quahties must be respected, 
be they good or ill. It does not seem as though 
Rousseau wishes even her faults to be corrected, 
because they may perchance help her to captivate 
men. A woman should remain a woman. It would 



88 ROUSSEAU 

be folly to wish for the cultivation of man^s qualities 
in her. Rousseau, who, on so many other points 
forestalled the tendencies and innovations of the 
modern mind, can in no wise be considered an expert 
in what is nowadays called ^^ woman's rights." 
Nothing would have offended him more than the 
claim to mingle and assimilate the two sexes in 
the same habits and functions. The modeUing of 
woman's education and hfe on man's would, to him, 
have seemed an aberration, a usurpation of the 
rights of the stronger sex, and, in another sense, a 
profanation. 

It is more especially when he considers woman's 
intellectual faculties that Rousseau shows himself 
unjust to them. He admits that their judgment is 
earlier formed, but he asserts that they soon allow 
themselves to be outdistanced. They have not 
sufficient attention and accuracy of mind to succeed 
in the exact sciences : — we may note, in passing, that 
Emile gives no evidence of any training in them, 
either. — Everything that tends to generahze ideas 
is outside their competence. All their reflections 
should centre in the study of men, or in agreeable 
acquirements which have ^Haste" as their object. 
Search after abstract truths is not suitable for them. 
No women philosophers or women mathematicians 
then : Rousseau would have refused another Sophie 



ROUSSEAU 89 

— Sophie Germain — the right to exist. Works of 
genius are beyond them. Is it not true, however, 
that, as a novehst, George Sand, to mention no 
others, has indeed some genius, at any rate as much 
as Rousseau? ... In short, feminine studies 
should relate exclusively to practical matters, and 
Rousseau would wilHngly repeat Mohere's words : — 
Is it not seemly, and for many reasons, 
That a woman should study and know so many things. . . . 

Sophie's instruction, then, is extremely Hmited. 
It could not be otherwise in a system which, on the 
one hand, lowers the function of woman, and, on the 
other hand, disparages her intelligence and powers. 
How can she be asked to acquire knowledge which 
will be useless to her in her role of humble subordi- 
nation, or to undertake studies which exceed the 
capacity of her mind ? In her Ubrary, Rousseau puts 
only two books, Telemachus — and even this is out 
of place, if it be true, as Rousseau tells us, that it 
excites a girPs imagination — and Comptes faits, by 
BarrSme. Sophie ought to understand thoroughly 
the keeping of household accounts. She must be a 
true housewife, knowing the prices of provisions, 
superintending her servants, such a wife as Xenophon 
had already pictured the partner of Ischomachus. 

In her youth, Sophie was especially engaged in 
learnino; needlework: she sews and embroiders. 



90 ROUSSEAU 

The wife of Emile, who has his working hours, must 
not be capable of neglecting manual occupations. 
Rousseau felt the importance of what is nowadays 
called the ^^ household education. '^ Sophie cuts out 
and makes her own dresses. She has a preference, 
it is true, for lace. \Vhy is this? It is because 
there is no form of needlework which ^ Ogives a more 
pleasing pose.^' Sophie remains somewhat coquet- 
tish, even in her household occupations. Rous- 
seau wishes — must he be blamed for it ? — a 
woman to be always attractive and elegant, to do 
everything gracefully. Nothing should detract from 
the charm of her personal appearance, even when she 
is cooking. Somewhat '^ foppish,^ ^ Sophie prefers 
burning the dinner to soiHng her cuff. Is Emile, who 
dines badly that evening, consoled by admiring the 
spotless cleanHness of Sophie's attire? There is, 
let us confess, something sickly and too deUcately 
refined in the education of this young woman who, 
for example, dislikes gardening, giving as a reason 
that '^the earth seems dirty to her." 

Sophie cultivates accompHshments, less for her 
personal benefit than to contribute later to her hus- 
band's amusement. She has a nice voice, and sings ; 
a taste for music, and plays. She can dance. But 
from all other points of view, she is decidedly an 
ignoramus. A little arithmetic — enough to total 



ROUSSEAU 91 

up the household expenses — has been taught her : 
^Terhaps women should before all learn to cipher," 
according to the natural method, however: ^'A 
httle girl can easily be persuaded to learn arith- 
metic, if care be taken to give her cherries for her 
lunch only on condition that she count them." 
But literature, poetry, and history she knows noth- 
ing of. Bluestockings are an affliction. ^^ Every 
learned girl will remain single all her life, when only 
men of sense are to be found." Rousseau would 
certainly not have approved of the creation of high 
schools, nor even elementary schools, for girls. 
" There are no colleges for women : what a misfor- 
tune. . . . Would to God there were none for 
boys. . . ." 

However insufficient Emile^s instruction may 
seem to us, Sophie's remains on a yet much lower 
plane. She is in no wise the enlightened woman 
whose action is necessary to regenerate the family 
and society. Rousseau, though he detested Paris, 
has made of her a frivolous Parisian, who is rather 
a grace than a power in the house, a charming play- 
thing or a thing of fashion. 

It is not alone by her insufficient instruction, 
which practically amounts to nothing, that Sophie 
differs from Emile; it is also in the nature of her 
education. The system on which a woman is 



92 ROUSSEAU 

educated should be different from that adopted in 
the case of a man. Emile does not make his entry 
into society till he is about twenty; Sophie is ad- 
mitted at a very early age. Before becoming a wife 
and mother, she must be acquainted with society 
and life. Reversing the usual practice by which a 
girl is kept in almost cloistered seclusion, and a 
woman is thrown into the whirlpool of society Hfe, 
Rousseau wishes Sophie to go often to balls, plays, 
suppers, accompanied by her mother, of course; 
but once married, she shuts herself up in the peace of 
domestic Hfe. Here we have quite a fresh inspira- 
tion, a scheme of education in the EngHsh or Ameri- 
can style. If Sophie is shown society, it is, however, 
that she may be made to feel its emptiness and vice, 
and may be sickened of it forever. Is it quite 
certain that this precocious emancipation would give 
the results that Rousseau expects ? Let us praise 
him, nevertheless, for having introduced the ele- 
ments of gayety, good temper, and Hberty, into a 
girl's life. Sophie is merry and ^'skittish"; she 
is not to live ^'\ike a grandmother.'' 

Another difference: from the earliest years of 
her infancy, rehgion will be mentioned to Sophie. 
The reason which Rousseau gives for this is the 
very one which we advanced against him, when he 
delayed for Emile this reUgious teaching which he 



ROUSSEAU 93 

hastens for Sophie. If we had to wait until a woman 
was able to conceive a true idea of religion, 'Ho dis- 
cuss these deep questions methodically, we should 
run a risk of never mentioning it to her." This is, 
then, only a fresh proof of the Httle esteem which 
Rousseau professed for feminine intelHgence. Sub- 
missive to the judgment of others, Sophie Mindly 
accepts her mother's religion. ''Every girl ought 
to have the rehgion of her mother, and every wife 
that of her husband.'' Opinion and authority, so 
boldly expelled from Emile's education, resume their 
sovereign sway when Sophie is in question. "Opin- 
ion," says Rousseau, emphatically "is with men the 
tomb of virtue, with women it is its throne" : which 
is to say that, in their beliefs as in their behavior, 
women are subject to the opinion of others. Wom- 
en's religion, moreover, is confined "in the nar- 
row circle of dogmas which derive from morahty." 
She is simple and reasonable, — "reasonable" is 
a word already used by Mme. de Maintenon. 
"Persuade her well that no knowledge is useful 
except such as teaches us well-doing. Do not make 
theologians and logicians of your daughters: teach 
them such of heaven's things alone as are of use for 
human wisdom. . . ." Morality is the essential 
part of rehgion, and we serve God by good actions. 
At times Rousseau hesitates, desisting from keep- 



94 ROUSSEAU 

ing woman in her state of subordination ; he seems to 
perceive that, to be a wife and mother, Sophie needs 
a Uttle more instruction. ^' There are," says he, 
''only two classes in humanity : those who think and 
those who do not think." And guiding Emile in 
the choice of a wife, he exhorts him to put aside all 
consideration of fortune or social rank, 'Ho take 
for his wife even the hangman's daughter, so Httle 
should he care for class." What does matter, 
is that a wife should think, know how to bring up 
her children, and be able to hve in communion of 
ideas with her husband. In that case, however, 
is it not evident that it would be indispensable to 
arrange for her a wider and more thorough instruc- 
tion? ''It is the husband," replies Rousseau, "who 
will teach her everything and be her instructor. . . ." 
I admit that he will complete and widen her in- 
struction, but on condition that, already as a girl, 
she has been initiated into the things of the mind. 
Let her be forbidden to read novels, — "never did 
a chaste girl read a novel," — this is already very 
severe ; but how sanction her never having a serious 
book in her hands and being as ignorant of Hterature 
as of science, "fatal science " ? This is, nevertheless, 
really the conclusion come to by Rousseau, who 
seemed to fear that by instructing woman she 
might be made man's equal, and that "the pre- 



ROUSSEAU 95 

eminence which nature gives to the husband might 
thus be conveyed to the wife/' 

It is true that Rousseau, if he abases woman on 
the one hand, exalts her on the other. ''Women,'' 
says he, '^have a supernatural talent for governing 
men. ..." But this so-called supernatural talent 
is nothing but their grace and beauty, and, in short, 
the very natural power which they exercise over 
man's senses. ''The best households," he says 
again, "are those in which the wife has most au- 
thority." Yes; but in his theories, this authority is 
not that of a cultured intelligence and tested reason ; 
it is simply a rule founded on gentleness, made last- 
ing by the httle methods which a wife's ingenuity or 
indulgence suggest to her. It it by her caresses 
that Sophie orders, it is by tears that she threatens. 
Mme. Roland's father, discussing the choice of a hus- 
band with her one day, said to her, "I understand 
you would hke to subjugate some one who thinks 
himself the master, doing everything that you wish. 
. . ." Sophie is of the same school. She appears 
to obey, but in fact she reigns and governs, and her 
sovereignty is due only to the seductions of her 
sex. 

A strange book, it must be admitted, is this 
romance of Sophie's education. In it charming 
things are mingled with pedantic dissertations. 



96 ROUSSEAU 

Delicate thoughts are near neighbors to declama- 
tions that might be described as the ramblings of a 
disordered brain. In it the highest lessons of virtue 
alternate with loose passages of vicious gallantry, 
and with rather free observations. The eulogy of 
Spartan or Roman manners is followed by pages in 
which one guesses that Rousseau found as much 
pleasure in reading Brantome as in reading the Bible, 
— which he had read right through more than six 
times, during the sleeplessness of his nights of sick- 
ness. We must not require from Rousseau the lofty 
purity of sentiment which the mission of woman's 
educator demands. How can we be touched by his 
enthusiasm for decency, modesty, and seemUness, 
when we have just heard him say that, '^Sophie 
does not display her charms ; on the contrary, she 
covers them up, but in covering them up she knows 
how to suggest them''? Or again, '^In Sophie's 
simple and modest attire, everything seems to have 
been put in its place only to be removed piece by 
piece. ..." We do not know, sometimes, when 
reading Emilej whether we are in presence of a severe 
morahst or a man of gallant adventures. What is 
not subject to doubt, is that the too reahstic memory 
of Mme. de Warens, or the ideal representation of 
Mme. Sophie d'Houdetot, — whom he loved too 
much 'Ho wish to possess her," — accompany and 



ROUSSEAU 97 

partly direct Rousseau^s pen when he is sketching 
Sophie's portrait. . . . 

I Do not let us, however, finish with this unfavor- 
able impression. If Sophie is not the strong, sen- 
sible, and enlightened woman that we could wish 
her to be, if she is rather a ^^weak, silly woman,'' 
more graceful than reasonable, seeking, above all, to 
please, not disdaining, in her coquetry, to display 
her white hand and shapely foot, let us, nevertheless, 
salute in her a pleasant wife, who can retain her 
husband's affections, a devoted mother, who feeds 
and brings up her children ; lastly, one who compen- 
sates by rare merits for the imperfections of her 
incomplete education. Of her independent hfe and 
her own personality, Rousseau takes no heed. It 
is conjugal intimacy alone which can make of two 
beings united for hfe one moral person. Woman is, 
then, only a part, a fragment of this moral person. 
As a compensation she will be the most seductive of 
companions for the man whose complement she is. 
Sophie is not one of ^Hhose who banish from mar- 
riage everything that can be agreeable to men." 
She is not a wearisome devotee, enslaved by those 
rigorous dogmas which, ^' by pushing duties to absurd 
hmits, make them imipracticable and vain." Rous- 
seau asserts that in his time ''so much had been done 
to prevent wives from being amiable, that husbands 



98 ROUSSEAU 

had been made indifferent." To the scolding, 
sullen wife he opposes one who is smihng and cheer- 
ful, who wishes to please and succeeds in doing so ; 
who makes the obligation of fidelity pleasant and 
easy for her lifers companion. One may be tempted 
to wonder how, after all the evil that he spoke of 
women, Rousseau met among them so many im- 
passioned admirers. It is because, if he did not 
assign to them their true rank, he at least flat- 
tered them ; hp encouraged them in their tendency 
to rule by the power of their natural charms 
alone. He hked and cajoled them a great deal. 
Observe with what satisfaction he forgets himself 
when depicting the early love passages between Emile 
and Sophie, what delicious trifles occupy him in the 
portrait which he paints of his heroine. To figure 
her as perfect, he draws upon all the races of human- 
ity. Sophie has the temperament of an ItaUan, the 
pride of a Spaniard, and the sensibiHty of an EngHsh- 
woman. All that she lacks to be perfect is, perhaps, 
the good sense and sedate simphcity of an instructed 
and cultured Frenchwoman. She also is a pupil of 
nature : ''She makes use only of scent which comes 
from flowers." — ''I never praise her so much as 
when she is simply clothed. ..." There are wise 
and beautiful sayings in the confusion of the fifth 
book of Emile; as, for example: ''Show woman in 



ROUSSEAU 99 

her duties the very source of her pleasures and 
foundation of her rights. Is it so difficult to love so 
as to be loved, to make oneself amiable so as to be 
happy, to make oneself esteemed so as to be obeyed, 
and to respect oneself so as to be respected? 
. . ." Many other passages explain, without how- 
ever justifying it entirely, the opinion of a German 
educational historian, Frederic Dittes, who went 
so far as to say that he considered the fifth part of 
Emile to be ^Hhe best book which has been written 
on woman's education." And, at all events, Sophie, 
despite the gaps in her education, is already the 
modern woman, created not for the church and the 
convent, but for family life ; despite her defects, she 
possesses this precious and fresh quaUty, that her 
virtue is amiable. 



VI 



The influence of Rousseau and his pedagogic 
thought was preponderant, as we shall see presently, 
chiefly in Germany. But the fame of Emile was uni- 
versal, and the echoes of it have not yet died away. 
As a man who sought after glory, and whose gloomy 
temper took umbrage at everything, Rousseau com- 
plained that Emile did not obtain the same success 
as his other writings. He was truly hard to please ! 
. . . The anger of some, the ardent sympathy of 
others ; on the one hand, parliamentary decrees con- 
demning the book and issuing a warrant for the 
author^s arrest, the thunders of the church and the 
famous mandate of the archbishop of Paris ; on the 
other hand, the applause of philosophers, of Clairaut, 
Duclos, and d'Alembert, . . . what more, then, did 
he want ? Emile was burned at Paris and Geneva ; 
but it was read with passion ; it was twice translated 
in London, an honor which no French work had 
received up tifl then. In truth, never did a book 
make more noise and thrust itself so much on the 
attention of men. By its defects, no less than by 

100 

il 



ROUSSEAU 101 

its qualities, by the inspired and prophetic character 
of its style, as well as by the paradoxical audacity 
of its ideas, Emile swayed opinion and stirred up the 
most generous parts of the human soul. It were 
too difficult to enumerate all the imitations and 
counterfeits which have been prompted by Rous- 
seau's powerful influence, to say nothing of the 
refutations, contradictions, and criticisms. The 
end of the eighteenth century witnessed the appear- 
ance of quite a succession, a posterity of Emiles: 
first, Anti-Emiles, then Christian Emiles, Corrected 
Emiles, New Emiles, Emiles retouched, improved, 
shortened, amphfied, and even Emiles converted to 
social fife. In many a place were attempts made to 
put into practice the education extolled by Rous- 
seau ; children were brought up in the Jean- Jacques 
style. Fashion took part in it. There were also 
'^ dresses in the Jean- Jacques style,'' of which it was 
said, in pecuhar language, that they were '^analo- 
gous to that author's principles." 

Rousseau had already carried utopianism very far ; 
it was, however, carried still farther. Let us mention, 
for example, a very curious book, which is, as it were, 
a caricature of Emile, VEleve de la nature, by Gas- 
pard de Beaurieu. However silly this utopianism 
may have been, it passed through no less than eight 
editions, between 1763 and 1794. So as the better 



102 ROUSSEAU 

to insure his Emile^s isolation, de Beaurieu had the 
idea of shutting him up in a wooden cage till he 
reached the age of fifteen; then he landed him on 
a desert island. . . . Nothing more extravagant 
could be conceived. And yet Rousseau did not 
disclaim his fantastic disciple: he loved his para- 
doxes to the extent of excusing and approving their 
exaggeration. In a letter of the 25th of May, 1764, 
he wrote: '^I have read UEleve de la nature. One 
cannot think with more intelligence, or write more 
pleasantly. . . .'' Without confusion, Rousseau 
looked at himself in the magnifying mirror in which 
an indiscreet admirer had already exaggerated his 
dreams. It is true that he added, not without a 
touch of irony: '^I advise M. de Beaurieu to always 
keep more to subjects which can be dealt with 
by descriptions and representations, than to those 
needing discussion and analysis. ... An agricul- 
tural treatise would suit him perfectly. ..." 

Happily, Rousseau found more serious imitators. 
The end would never be reached if we mentioned all 
the great men who, in literature or politics, make 
for him in posterity a long train of admirers. How 
many revolutionists fed on the maxims of Contrat 
social, and felt the political influence of Rousseau, 
a ^^ disastrous" influence, however, according to 
Auguste Comte, who describes his doctrines as 



4 



ROUSSEAU 103 

'^anarchical"? Are not Chateaubriand, George 
Sand, and many others, the progeny of the author of 
La Nouvelle Heloise? . . . But we have only to 
occupy ourselves in this place with educators, and 
it is perhaps on them that the salutary action of 
Rousseau's thought has most usefully been exercised. 

The revolution of 1789 did not last long enough to 
make it possible that anything of permanence in the 
matter of education should be accompHshed. But 
Rousseau's inspiration is apparent in the majority 
of the projects which it improvised without ever 
succeeding in putting them into operation. The 
chimerical plans of Saint-Just and Lepelletier de 
Saint-Fargeau' emanate directly from Emile, In 
year III, Marie- Joseph Chenier asked 'Hhat the 
method pursued by Rousseau in Emile's education 
should be appUed to the entire nation." 

Rousseau's teachings, in truth, obtained more 
theoretical admiration than practical appHcation. 
It has never been proposed, for example, to bring 
into existence those Schools of the fatherland imagined 
by the gentle and sentimental Bernardin de Saint- 
Pierre, the cheerful Utopian, idylhc reformer, and 
nature enthusiast. At least it must be admitted 
that in suppressing punishments and rewards in 
his educational scheme, in removing the motive 
of emulation, and on yet many other points, Ber- 



104 ROUSSEAU 

nardin merely copies Rousseau, whose friend, con- 
fidant, and consoler he had been. 

Women have had a special fondness for Rous- 
seau. Who loved and extolled him more than Mme. 
Roland, ^^Jean-Jacques' daughter," or the "Jean- 
Jacques of women," as she has been called? In 
1777, she wrote to one of her friends : ^^I love Rous- 
seau beyond expression. ... I carry Rousseau in 
my heart. ..." She especially esteemed him for 
having revealed to her domestic happiness and the 
ineffable deUghts which may be tasted in family 
hfe. For her part, Mme. de Stael greets Emile as 
"an admirable book, which puts envy to shame after 
exciting it," and she tells us that, in her youth, she 
fell in love with negative education. Rousseau's 
influence is perceptible on even those women educa- 
tors who most contested the conclusions of Emile. 
The principal work of Mme. de GenHs, Adele et Theo- 
dore, often recalls Emile et Sophie: the indirect 
lessons, the artificial and prepared scenes, dear to 
Rousseau, are found again in it. Mme. Necker de 
Saussure, though opposed to the principles of eigh- 
teenth-century philosophy, often draws inspiration 
from him, after contradicting him. Like him, she 
sees in the child a being apart, whose education has 
rules of its own. She holds again, after him, the 
idea of a progressive development of the faculties, 



ROUSSEAU 105 

and consequently that of the sequence of methods 
appropriate to the age and powers of the child. 

It has been said of Rousseau that he introduced 
into French hterature the genius of the north, that 
he was of a German or Enghsh temperament. I 
do not know whether this view is very accurate. 
Rousseau knew nothing of Germany. He did not 
hke the EngUsh. ^'I have no penchant for England. 
. . .'' He was brought especially under French 
influence during his wanderings across France and 
his long sojourn in Paris ; and, indeed, nourished by 
classical reading, he may quite as properly be re- 
garded as a representative of the extreme sensibihty 
of southern races. What, however, is certain, is 
that this child of Geneva, if not of '^Teutonic" 
genius, became Teutonic by his influence. As the 
lamented Joseph Texte has shown in his fine book, 
Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les origines du cosmo- 
politisme litteraire, his light has gone forth into all 
lands. The success of his works and the propaga- 
tion of his ideas made him a cosmopoHtan. 

There is hardly a German writer but has borne 
him favorable testimony, usually, indeed, enthusi- 
astic homage. Basedow, a pedagogue who had in 
his time a great but httle deserved reputation, 
swears only by Rousseau, whose theories he uses, 
in his way, with frenzied zeal. Having no son, he 



106 ROUSSEAU 

finds consolation in calling his daughter ^'Emilie." 
Lavater shows himself as eager as Basedow for the 
reformation of education in the direction of the 
doctrines of Entile. But here are weightier authori- 
ties. Lessing declares that he cannot pronounce 
the name of Rousseau '^without respect/' Schiller 
extols 'Hhe new Socrates, who of Christians wished 
to make men." Goethe calles Emile ^Hhe teacher's 
gospel." Kant affirms that no book ^' moved him 
so deeply." He read it with such avidity, that, in 
his strictly ordered fife, 'Hhe regularity of his daily 
walks was for a time disturbed." In his httle 
Treatise on Pedagogics, many principles are bor- 
rowed from Entile: for him also nature is good. 
Herder, who has been named ^Hhe German Rous- 
seau," cries out, 'Tome, Rousseau, be thou my 
guide"; and in a letter to his beloved Carohne, he 
acclaims Entile as ' 'a divine work." In his Levana, 
Jean-Paul Richter says that, of all previous works 
to which he feels himself indebted, it is to Emile 
that he must assign the front rank, that ''no pre- 
ceding work can be compared to it." But it is to 
Pestalozzi especially that is due the honor of 
developing and popularizing, whilst attempting to 
apply them, the methods of Rousseau, whose works 
had early fixed his imagination: "The system of 
Uberty founded ideally by the author of Entile 



ROUSSEAU 107 

excited in me a boundless enthusiasm." Lastly, 
Froebel, who wished to replace books by things, 
who had nothing so much at heart as the preserva- 
tion of the child^s spontaneity, deserves a place in 
the golden book of Rousseau's disciples. And it 
is not only in the great men of Germany that Rous- 
seau inspired new sentiments: thinkers of lesser 
importance, Jacobi, Heinse, KHnger, and yet many 
others, took part in this adoring veneration which 
Germany professed for the French educator. 

Rousseau has been somewhat less appreciated in 
England. There also, however, despite the scandal 
of his ridiculous rupture with Hume, he found im- 
mediate favor and success. Emile was translated 
in London as soon as it appeared; and a second 
edition was soon called for. In 1789 David Will- 
iams said, ^^ Rousseau is in full possession of the 
pubhc attention.'' It is true that opinion was 
occupied with the political theories of Contrat social 
rather than the pedagogical conceptions of Emile. 
Somewhat neglected for a century, Rousseau was 
again brought forward by Mr. John Morley, and 
also by a distinguished educational historian, Robert 
Quick. The latter opines that 'Hhe truths contained 
in Emile will survive the fantastic forms in which 
the author enveloped them." In his eyes, Emile is 
*Hhe most influential book ever written on educa- 



108 ROUSSEAU 

tion.'' This is also the opinion of John Morley, 
who states that Emile is '^one of the seminal books 
in the history of Hterature." Again we have George 
Eliot's avowal: ^^ Rousseau has breathed life into 
my soul, and awakened new faculties in me. ..." 
And lastly, is it not true that Rousseau's principle, 
the return to nature, dominates the pedogogics of 
Herbert Spencer, the most briUiant educational 
theorist of contemporary England? 

Apparently it is in America that Rousseau has 
met with least sympathy, and we must not be much 
surprised at this. How could this dreamer, this 
indolent idler, this heroic representative of the 
sensibihty of the Latin races, be gifted with the 
power of pleasing the virile, rugged minds and busy, 
practical temperaments of the citizens of the New 
World ? In the study which he recently devoted to 
him, Mr. Thomas Davidson admits his discomfiture. 
On examination, the most vaunted theories of Rous- 
seau have disappointed him. He did not find in 
them the firm and sohd substance which he expected 
to obtain from a study of Emile. And yet, when 
closely examined, American education, as we see it 
practically developing at the present time, has more 
than one point of resemblance with the ideal peda- 
gogics of Rousseau. One of the leaders of American 
education, Dr. Charles W. Ehot, the revered president 



ROUSSEAU 109 

of Harvard University, summarizing the progress 
accomplished in his country during the nineteenth 
century, draws attention especially to the intro- 
duction of two essential things into the school cur- 
riculum: nature study and manual training. The 
American child is no longer a logical phantom, stuffed 
with words and abstractions, but a hving creature, 
working with hands as well as mind. . . . But is 
not all this Rousseau ? Similarly, Dr. Eliot points 
out that an improvement has come about in dis- 
cipline. In rehgion, love has been substituted for 
fear; in poHtics, people have begun to understand 
that the government of nations should no longer re- 
main what for thousands of years it has been, — the 
work of an absolute and arbitrary will; that in its 
place must be put the free government of the people 
by the people ; and consequently people have come 
to think that the modern and more accurate con- 
ception of a good government for a nation^s citizens 
held lessons for us on the subject of a good govern- 
ment for children, who also should be freed, as far 
as possible, from the yoke of the old tutelage, and 
trained in self-government. . . . But is not this 
also Rousseau? 

Without our suspecting it, Rousseau's pedagogical 
spirit has insinuated itself into and penetrated the 
methods of teaching and the educational practices 



110 ROUSSEAU 

which the present time endeavors more and more to 
honor. Go into one of the infant schools: object- 
lessons are given ; the children are shown the things 
themselves, and the method of observation and direct 
intuition is put into practice. Make obeisance: 
Rousseau it is who inspired these methods. . . . 
Pay a visit to one of those English colleges which 
M. Demohns is attempting to imitate and popularize 
in France : there you will find masters who are both 
guardians and professors, never leaving their pupils, 
who, hke them, five in the college from morning till 
night; how can we avoid recognizing in them the 
actual descendants of the imaginary tutor to whom 
Rousseau confided the care of Emile ? . . . Enter 
one of those American schools in which the abuse of 
books and manuals is condemned, and in which the 
mental slavery of mechanical instruction has been 
exchanged for methods of intellectual freedom, so 
that the child shall acquire what it is requisite to 
know as far as possible by himself and by his per- 
sonal effort. In this, again, you will be forced to 
acknowledge the hand of Rousseau. . . . Where- 
soever discipHne has become more liberal, where 
active methods are supreme, and where the child is 
kept constantly in a state of interest, Hvely curiosity, 
and sustained attention, his dignity being at the 
same time respected, there we may say Rousseau 
has passed by. 



ROUSSEAU 111 

Utopias perish, but the truth endures. The spirit 
survives the letter. We cannot, indeed, hope to 
derive from Rousseau's pedagogics a definite and 
final system of methods and procedure. But what 
is perhaps better, he handed on to his successors and 
still imparts to all who read him a spark, at least, 
of the flame which burned in him. As Mme. de Stael 
said, he has perhaps discovered nothing, but he has 
set everything ablaze. His eloquence was the most 
powerful appeal ever addressed to parents and 
masters to exhort them to take their task as educa- 
tors seriously. With him, education became a 
sacred mission, a subhme ministry. Into educa- 
tional questions he instilled a spirit of life, a move- 
ment of passion, unknown to the cold, dry peda- 
gogues who had dealt with such questions before 
him. Henceforth the educator's part is raised and 
ennobled ; and, by the fire of his enthusiasm, Rous- 
seau stamped the science and art of rearing men with 
the majesty and solemnity of a kind of rehgious reve- 
lation. 

And as, in Rousseau's works, time, eliminating 
his mistakes, maintains and develops the Hving seed 
which he sowed abundantly in the field of education, 
so with the man himself, in his character and 
acts, distance and the flight of ages hide from us 
defects and misdeeds, which, httle by Httle, return to 



112 ROUSSEAU 

shadow, in order to let us see only his quahties 
and virtues. 

If Rousseau still exercises great seduction over the 
human intellect, it is not solely by virtue of the force 
of his innovating genius. Neither is it by the mere 
effect of his style, sometimes somewhat heavy, but 
whence at every moment flashes forth the lightning ; 
that style which earned him the title of the ^^king 
among prose- writers.'' It is because, behind the 
writer and thinker, we feel the pulsations of the most 
sincere heart which ever throbbed in the breast of 
man. Voltaire's enmity must have been strong indeed 
to blind him to such a degree that he could write : ^'It 
is useless for Rousseau to play now the stoic and now 
the cynic : he beUes himself continually. The man 
is factitious from head to foot." The opposite is 
the truth. Rousseau's great charm, the secret of the 
irresistible sympathy which he inspires, is precisely 
that he yields his entire self, that he displays him- 
self, as it were, stripped to the skin. With a soul 
more sensitive than meditative, a mind more aes- 
thetic than philosophic, he did not know that self- 
possession, that mastery of a firm, cool judgment, 
which permits a thinker to control the turmoil 
of sentiments and the confusion of images, so as to 
construct and organize a system of connected and 
consistent argument. From this arises the hesita- 



ROUSSEAU 113 

tions and contradictions of his thought. On the 
other hand, a dreamer guided by his senses, he could 
offer no resistance to instinctive impulses; whence 
the faihngs of his moral Hfe, faihngs, moreover, which 
we are aware of only through his own confession. 
Many men of genius have doubtless had these same 
passions and frailties; they, however, have hidden 
them as much as possible, whilst he spread them 
abroad in the shameless candor of his Confessions. 

There is nothing fixed or precise in Rousseau's 
moral philosophy. Rules of conduct strongly 
enough estabhshed to suffice for the rearing of men 
cannot be found in it. There is something of the 
stoic in him, but the epicurean gets the upper hand. 
'^The man who has lived most,'' says he, '^is not the 
one who counts most years, but the one who has most 
felt Hfe." To enjoy hfe, that is the object he pre- 
scribes for Emile. It is true that Rousseau im- 
mediately writes: ''Shall I add that his object is 
also to do good, when he is able ? No ; for that 
is itself to enjoy hfe. ..." The accomplishment 
of duty is presented, not as a law and an obhgation, 
but as a source of pleasure. The stoic reappears 
when Rousseau advises the hmitation of desires, 
when he says that the essentially good man is he who 
has least needs, who is self-sufficing. In this respect, 
Rousseau generally acted in accordance with his 



114 ROUSSEAU 

maxims. He was intemperate at times. In his 
youth he pilfered from M. de Mably's cellars bottles 
of a white wine for which he had a hking, and many 
other peccadillos could be mentioned. But taking 
his Ufe as a whole, he was sober, simple in his tastes, 
an enemy of luxury, temperate, and even austere. 

What he lacked, more than lofty and noble inspi- 
rations, was the necessary energy to keep to them. 
His senses and imagination governed his existence. 
Could it be otherwise, considering the education 
which he had received ? While yet a child, his father 
read novels with him till morning; and only when 
he heard the swallow's notes did he say, '^Let us 
go to bed, Jean- Jacques ! . . .'' A friend of virtue 
rather than virtuous, agitated rather than active, 
a slave to his sensations when he would fain have 
been the apostle of hberty, tossed about by the ca- 
prices of his fancy when he claimed to be estabUshing 
among men the reign of sovereign reason, capable 
of being at times a hero of courage and disinterested- 
ness, to descend afterwards to unworthy and even 
criminal actions; sentimentaHst and ideahst, yet 
often allowing I know not what coarse echo of erotic 
sensuaUty to be heard in his most poetic hymns to 
love and beauty, in the torrent of his Hfe he mingled 
muddy waters with the purest streams. At times in- 
toxicated with subhme thoughts, he nevertheless 



ROUSSEAU 115 

evaded the strictest and pleasantest duties ; and he 
has not absolved himself from his faults by a too pla- 
tonic enthusiasm for righteousness. Too often has he 
hved selfishly, seeking the solitude which was sooth- 
ing to his reveries, flying the men who troubled his 
pride. He was imbued with his own opinion to the 
point of wilhngly parting company with common 
sense, and was so elated with his personaUty that 
he thought himself an exceptional being, of a race 
apart: ^^WTiy did Providence cause me to be born 
among men, having made me of a species different 
from them? ..." 

Yet this somewhat wild misanthrope has contrib- 
uted to a greater love of hfe by introducing into 
it more Hberty, joy, and faith; by arousing and 
strengthening, according to Mme. Roland^s phrase, 
''all the affections which attach us to existence": 
devotion to humanity, enthusiasm for the ideal, 
friendship and love. He has been generous and 
helpful. His dream was the happiness of man: 
''Make your paradise upon earth, whilst awaiting 
the other." He worked for a fresh, rejuvenated 
society, freed from the prejudices of the past : "Woe 
to thee, thou stream of custom!" In an age of 
courtiers, he courageously safeguarded his right of 
free speech, and under an oppressive rule he main- 
tained his independence at the cost of his happiness. 



116 ROUSSEAU 

He was a citizen. One of Geneva's sons, he drew 
from the traditions of his first fatherland the love 
of hberty, the repubhcan pride: '^With us, maxims 
are imbibed with the mother's milk." In a society 
of sceptics and profligates, he was simple and a be- 
hever. Literary critics have praised Rousseau for 
introducing into France the dreamy melancholy 
of northern lands. Yes, but this melancholy is not 
found in Emile, which is, on the contrary, an opti- 
mistic book, with a joyous confidence in the future. 
Really Hving and fertile minds are those which look, 
not to the past, but to the future ages : Rousseau is of 
their number. In his sovereign disdain of antiquated 
tradition, he prepared the youth of the newly dawn- 
ing era. With Voltaire, said Goethe, a world has 
come to an end; with Rousseau, a world begins. 
The eighteenth century, especially with Rousseau, 
is the rally to eternal nature, the commencement 
of a forward movement, a bold anticipation of the 
future. 

I am wilUng that Rousseau be criticised and his 
errors blamed : but let us not be forbidden to ad- 
mire him. He will not cease to be read, followed, and 
obeyed, in some, at least, of his prescriptions. He 
will always be a leaven of life and moral regeneration. 
He can proudly say to his critic, ^^ Strike, but 
hsten.'' Above all, he will be loved to all eternity. 



ROUSSEAU 117 

I am well aware that Mme. du Deffand, who re- 
proached him with wishing to plunge everything 
back into chaos, called him ^'an antipathetic 
sophist." But this is merely an exception, a voice 
lost in the chorus of praise which is everywhere 
uplifted in his honor. The women at all times have 
been enraptured with Rousseau, and men have been 
no more niggardly with the tribute of their devotion. 
''I love Emile,^^ said Saint-Marc Girardin, and he 
learnedly expounded his reasons. He is not the 
only one who has spoken in this way. ^^It will 
always be impossible for us not to love Jean- Jacques 
Rousseau," declared Sainte-Beuve fifty years ago. 
And recently, the same declaration came, like a 
refrain, from the pen of M. Jules Lemaitre: '^It is 
impossible for me not to love him : I feel that he was 
good." Let us love him, because he was indeed 
good, because, thanks to him, a breath of humanity 
and good-will penetrated and softened men's hearts, 
because he himself loved truth, and because he con- 
ceived an ardent love of justice, and from his child- 
hood was inspired with transports of anger at its 
violation. Let us love him and pity him also because 
of his sufferings. Let us leave to curious and prying 
minds the task of deciding what was the cause of 
these sufferings, the mental malady, the kind of 
madness with which he was afflicted. We wish 



118 ROUSSEAU 

not to know whether he were neurotic, hysterical, or 
simply melancholy mad. What is certain and enough 
for us, is that he was a man of heart and of genius 
to boot. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Of Rousseau's own works, besides Emile, should be read : — 

Projet pour V education de M. de Sainte-Marie (1740). 

La Nouvelle Helolse, 5th part, Letter III (1761). 

Emile et Sophie ou les Solitaires (1778). 

Lettre a Christophe de Beaumont, archeveque de Paris (1763). 

Considerations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur la rejorme 
projetee en 1772 (1772). 

In the Correspondance, the Letters to the prince of Wiirtem- 
berg (1763), and passim. 

Only the most important and recent of the numerous publica- 
tions dealing with Emile and Rousseau's ideas are mentioned 
below : — 

F. Brockerdoff, J. -J. Rousseau, sein Leben und seine WerkCy 
3 vols., Leipzig, 1863. 

H. Beaudouin, La vie et les oeuvres de J. -J. Rousseau, 2 vols., 
Paris, 1871. 

Saint-Marc Girardin, J. -J. Rousseau, sa vie et ses ouvrages, 
2 vols., Paris, 1875. 

J. -J. Rousseau juge par les Genevois d'aujourd'hui, lectures 
given at Geneva, on the occasion of the centenary of 2d July, 
1878, Geneva, 1879. See especially : Les idees de Rousseau sur 
Veducation, by Andr^ Oltramare, and Caracteristique generate 
de Rousseau, by H. Frederic Amiel. 

John Morley, Rousseau, 2 vols., London, 1888 (1st edition, 
1873). 

E. Ritter, La famille et la jeunesse de J -J. Rousseau, Paris, 
1896. 

119 



120 ROUSSEAU 

Streckeisen-Moulton, J. -J. Rousseau, ses amis et ses enne- 
mis, 2 vols., Paris, 1865. 

A. Chuquet, J. -J. Rousseau, in the Great French Writers series, 
Paris, 1893. 

Davidson, Rousseau and Education according to Nature, in 
The Great Educators series, New York and London, 1898. 

J. Texte, J.-J. Rousseau et les origines du cosmopolitisme 
litter aire, Paris, 1895. 

A. EspiNAS, Le systeme de J.-J. Rousseau, in la Revue inter- 
naiionale de Venseignement, vols. XXX and XXXI, 1895 and 
1896. See also: Musset-Pathay, Histoire de la vie et des 
ouvrages de J.-J. Rousseau (1821) ; Robert H. Quick, Essays on 
educational reformers, London, 1868; Rousseau's Emile, trans- 
lated and abridged by E. Worthington, with notes by Jules Steeg, 
Boston and London, 1883; Emile, abridged and annotated by 
William H. Payne, New York, 1893 ; Hanus, Rousseau and 
Education accordi7ig to Nature, New York, 1897; M. Greard, 
L' education des femmes par les femmes; and finally, articles or 
chapters devoted to Rousseau by M. Brunetiere, Etudes 
critiques sur la litterature frangaise, 3d and 4th series; by 
M. Faguet, XVIIP siecle : Etudes litteraires, 1890 ; by Taine, 
Les origines de la France contemporaine : VAncien regime, 1882; 
by Melchior de Vogue, Histoire et Poesie, 1898; by M. E. 
LiNTiLHAC, Litterature frangaise, etc. 



i\ 



BD 6,8. 



